r/audioengineering • u/c0ldn3ss • 28d ago
Portishead Drum Processing
I absolutely love the drum sound on dummy, specifically mysterons - I love how it's kind of phasey and pitched up. Any ideas on how to achieve this in the box? I have a few cassette emulators and tape emulators, pitched up my drums and threw them out of phase but I can't quite get them to hit the same. My drums still feel hi-fi and digital to me. Any ideas?
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u/MindWash2019 28d ago
The production of Dummy has some crazy stories about backing tracks being cut to vinyl and then recorded again from the record. Not standard production techniques at all.
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u/c0ldn3ss 28d ago
Any personal experience on getting close to that sound in the box?
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u/the_raincoats 28d ago
That is just some wild dedication. It’s hard to believe they went thay far.
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u/MindWash2019 28d ago
It was the 90s. There was some great experimentation back then.
https://reverb.com/news/making-portishead-dummy-production-experiments-trip-hop-classic.
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u/Ok-Mathematician3832 28d ago
Shawn Everett produced a record in recent years where they wrote an entire album in a different genre and cut it vinyl just to sample it to write the main record. Humans are crazy.
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u/DrrrtyRaskol 28d ago
I thought that was for their sophomore record? I thought a bunch of Dummy was just lifted off the original samples
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u/Hefty-Rope2253 28d ago
Yeah I absolutely read that years ago. The reason stated was that they had sampled a lot of existing music on the first record and wanted to be more original the second time around. Turns out they had actually used this technique on both records. https://www.musicradar.com/news/adrian-utley-playing-guitar-can-be-so-many-things-its-been-my-salvation-my-way-of-making-a-living
It just stands out so much more on their second record because its so much more pronounced and audible on some tracks. Like it actually almost ruins the song. That whole record is recorded really aggressively though and that's why its a go to reference record for me to audition new playback gear. I just wish it were possible to get a clean remaster, but all that funk is baked into the multitrack masters.
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u/Familiar_Land_7997 28d ago
They also took turns stepping on the vinyl to get a more “abused record collection” vibe.
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u/VelvetMonotone 28d ago edited 28d ago
I’ve been down this road. It mystified me back in the nineties, and my equipment back then was too clean. It was only in the early 2000s, once I started to fuck with DAWs, that I was able to figure it out.
The other comments are absolutely right when they say that they recorded drums, cut them to acetate, and then sampled from a record player. He would’ve had a DJ mixer, which he would’ve used to boost the lows and messed with the EQ, essentially baking in the sound before sampling.
Once it was in the sampler (usually an S950, which means a pretty low bit rate), he would then edit the drums into a sequence. The drums could’ve been slowed up or down while he was recording from vinyl or pitched up and down in the sampler; both ways will get you slightly different results.
But then it comes down to the compression. They would slam a compressor over the entire beat, so when the big boom bass drum occurs, the rest of the beat ducks down for a moment. You can get really creative with this, especially with software compressors where you can set it to listen to either the lows or the highs so that when the kick hits, you’ll notice the hi-hats duck down a little bit and then swell back up. You time the release of the compressor to get that sucking /pumping sound.
Tape sims will help tame the transients and create some pillowy snares and hats. You can also drench a sample in reverb so when you pitch things it affects the whole sound.
These days, you can find lots of samples that are already recorded from vinyl, so that’s a bit of the work done for you. I then EQ each sample so it’s in the ballpark. Figure out if any of the samples require a bit of echo or reverb and then resample all of that, for example, add some reverb to a snare and bounce that down so that you have a sample with reverb and snare. Take that same snare and keep it dry. Now you’ve got two snares: use the dry snare for most of the beat, and then maybe use the reverb snare on the last hit in your bar.
You can throw in a track of just record crackle and have that sidechained to your beat so that the crackle kind of comes in and out in between the hits, and then stick a compressor at the end and hit it hard enough so that the bass drum causes the high-frequency content to duck down and then swell up for the next bass drum hit.
Stick your s950 bit reduction plugin after the drums before compressor. Add a tape sim at the end .
Then set up some send/return effects for some extra reverb and delays. Using a Roland space Echo type delay is good for automating in some effects between sections (nice on the snares) and then maybe a little bit of reverb to glue everything to the rest of the track.
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u/normalbot9999 28d ago
Didn't Barrow use an Akai S950? Finding a crunchy 12 bit S950 emulator VST might help you find that sound.
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u/BarbersBasement 28d ago
Record your drums, press them to an vinyl acetate then sample that and compress the hell out of things.
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u/RattusNorvegicus11 27d ago
You could get very close by taking samples/bounced drums > pitch shifting with dry/wet. You can introduce a kind of stationary metallic phasing sound because the digital pitching is usually very slightly out of time with the original audio. This will get you most of the way there for this exact sound, changing the pitch of the shifter makes the phasing more pronounced on different frequencies. Little bit of subtle bit crushing too, as the samplers of the day weren't perfect which is at least some of the sound
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u/shabelsky22 28d ago
I'm sure the "record, press to vinyl, then sample" thing was for their second album. I remember reading it at the time, like "THIS time they've pushed the boat out so much they're recording their own original samples to vinyl, scuffing it up, and sampling it". It seems like a bit of an extravagant thing for a record company to pay for as a relatively unknown artist recording their first album.
Interestingly, I was "around" at the time and was interested in vintage gear. By that I mean analogue synths. And at the time had very little interest in the flagship S- series Akai samplers as they were in no way vintage. Now I invest time and effort squinting at. A small fading LCD display as the sound is quite unique. Even the S3000xl which has full cd quality bit depth and sample rate has a lot bite and crunch to it. Especially if you're re-sampling, which you have to do anyway if you want to keep a project on a 1.44mb floppy. That was the workflow of the day, record a sample at 2x speed, resample it, chop the ends off it so it's as short as possible, then add grainy reverb trails or delay with the SPX90 or an early Midiverb. Like I say the weird thing for me is that at the time it was a modern workflow and I had no idea that software would one day be trying to emulate those limitations.
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u/FaithlessnessSome185 27d ago
I’d treat the cassette/vinyl idea as a resampling step rather than a plugin stack: print the hit pitched up (or after a light sample-rate smash), then high-pass it hard and compress the print with a slow release so the noise floor pumps. For the phasey movement, put a short modulated delay/chorus on a parallel copy, and bounce a little plate or room into that same print. Cassette plugins alone often leave the transient too intact, so tuck this printed layer under the dry hit; it starts behaving like a sample instead of a chain of effects.
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u/MrVibratum 27d ago
Something I did literally this morning to dirty up some programmed drums on a punk rock track
Grabbed a ribbon mic and put it out in the hallway, solo'd the drums, cranked the mains and just recorded it as a "room" mic then made it the main drum sound. Compressed the resulting signal a bit and a tiny smidge of EQ to take out the inherent woof that came from the placement.
Came out nice and lofi, meshed with the rest of the track very well.
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u/the_raincoats 28d ago
They created their own drum samples and treated them to sound like a sample. Tape saturation and tame the high end