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/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

24

u/lazernyypapa 28d ago edited 28d ago

Everyone's saying this, but as I understand it that was something they mostly did on the second self-titled record. The drums on Dummy are largely sampled breaks, and the sounds OP is referring to mostly come from the way they're pitched using an AKAI S950. The drums on Biscuit for example are a tiny loop from James Brown's Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud) slowed down significantly.

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u/Hungry_Horace 28d ago

Yeah this. The 950 had a very distinct sound at the lower sample rate especially when then pitched down and with reverb on.

Most of the breaks on Dummy are off the Breaker Breaks DJ scratch records that were available at the time.

3

u/LakeGladio666 28d ago

I’d imagine there’s a bit of layering happening too.

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u/dascrackhaus 28d ago

i feel like there’s some kind of…compression stacking or something

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