UA Heritage: Allen Sides - Recording a Drum Library in a Bill Putnam Room
By Marsha Vdovin

Allen Sides
This month, we'll talk about the old while talking about the new. I interviewed engineer and studio owner Allen Sides about his new library of drum sounds. What's the catch? He recorded it all at Ocean Way Studio B (formerly United), in a room designed by Bill Putnam. We had a fun conversation about his new Ocean Way product.

Please tell me about Ocean Way Drums
I put together Ocean Way Drums because, as an engineer and a producer, I use a lot of drum-sample libraries. What I find most of the time is that, in an entire library, if I can find one kick or snare I like, I think I'm doing pretty well. Most of the time what I hear isn't particularly good, and certainly not particularly well recorded … at least by my standards. Conceptually, I guess I come from the "bigger-than-life school." I like things to sound almost super-real. But, it's probably going to end up on MP3. I find that you can't make it big enough in the control room, because where it ends up will most likely be smaller. So I look to make the biggest sounds I can. For me, making a drum-sample library, my only interest is to have the most impressive-sounding drum kits possible. So we put nineteen drum kits on there. I probably picked those from maybe 80 sets of drums. And I probably had 50 or 60 snares to choose from. I tuned and tweaked every drum myself, until I got what I wanted, because, sonically, if it's not shocking, why bother to put it on there? And the other issue I had was that with most drum-sample libraries that exist, the information comes to you in a somewhat unfinished state. Meaning that you'll listen to a drum, but rarely is it in a state that you could use it. What I wanted to do was have "instant sonic gratification." We have 19 drum kits, but I came up with six presets for every drum kit, that are finished mixes from dry to live. So basically you can pick the drum kit you like, you can pick a preset that sounds like the right finished mix, and add bass. But of course, all the elements are fully variable as well.

One of the reasons we decided to use the [Native Instruments] Kontact sampler format is because of the complexity of what we did in regards to the amount of elements involved. When you record drums, most people are recording in a conventional format, meaning they put the mikes the way they would if they were recording the drums, say for an album. But for a sound library, there are things I could do that I couldn't do if a drummer was playing there live, to make it more impressive. I'm trying to isolate from the rest of the drums, so I actually did things in the recording that I feel make the individual samples even more impressive than had I recorded it in a conventional format. For example, for recording a snare, we end up with a stereo pair under the snare, stereo pair close over the snare, a secondary, slightly more distant stereo pair over the snare, and then we also have overhead a original [AKG] C 12s, [Neumann] M50s, we used omni [Neumann] U47s for the secondary rooms, and we also have multiple compressed room tracks. If you handed all that to someone as an element, without having a preset, there might be the question of "Where do I start?" So that's where we came from. We wanted you to be able to call up a kit, drop it in, and it sounds basically like a finished mix. Then if you, for example, pick a medium setting in the presets, then add guitars and vocals, and you find it's becoming a little dry, you can reach for any one of the ambient tracks and increase them, easily. And of course in all the samples, every sample is in stereo, and in multiple sets of stereos. So I think that's really what's unique about Ocean Way Drums.

I tuned and tweaked every drum myself, until I got what I wanted, because, sonically, if it's not shocking, why bother to put it on there?

And then there is the actual room these where recorded in. Years ago, when I took over my first room, Studio B, Bill [Putnam] said to me that of all the rooms he'd ever designed, Studio B was the high point, he felt, of his technology--of what he'd come up with to that point. He'd done a number of his best recordings in that room. Including the Ray Charles "I Can't Stop Loving You." When I decided to do Ocean Way Drums, obviously, there's just no better room in the country than this room to do that sort of thing. The acoustics in this space are spectacular. And the other thing that's sort of interesting is that Putnam basically designed the console that we recorded this through. It was a custom, one-off board that sits in Studio B, and has been in that room since I've owned that studio. Studio B is the same room Green Day’s American Idiot was recorded. We've done the last couple Eric Clapton albums in there, the last Paul McCartney before this one was recorded in there. The new Herbie Hancock record that was Record of the Year was recorded in there. We just did the Kanye West record there and just finished a new Dido album in there.

So that's the room to record in if you want a Grammy, right?
Yeah. [Laughs.] If you want a Grammy, that room has a history. We did Radiohead, Hail to the Thief in that room as well.

You used the preamps in the console?
Yeah. It's a very unusual console, in that from microphone in to bus out, there are three preamps in the entire chain. And the preamps slew at 200V/µs, so they're unbelievably fast. And they run on high-voltage rails, they swing a lot of current, using an input transformer designed by Bill Putnam. It's a 1:1 ratio transformer, custom built for Bill. So it's really a one-off. I don't think there's anything quite like it. Chris Lord-Alge describes it as the "baseball bat" console, in regards to the amount of punch and impact it gives. So really we're using what Bill felt was the best room he ever built, and we're using his own custom console. So I'd say that Bill is somewhat tied into this project.

Do you use any compression?
What we do it this: all the initial signals--once again we'll go back to a snare example--the under snares, the close, secondary snares, the distance snares, and the first sets of room mikes and the overheads are all uncompressed. But then we have two sets of compressed rooms mics that can be added in, or are part of one of the presets. We don't compress any of the initial signals because we're looking to get the most impact and punch we can, and once you squash it, you can never get it back. But you can get all of the floor and sustain you want by bringing in the compressed rooms. And also in the Kontact format, there are overall compressors available within the format to insert across the lines if you wish to.

Did you use UA gear to compress it?
We did. We used two sets of compressors. One set is a pair of black 1176s, for one set of compressed rooms, and the second pair of compressed rooms is an Orange County stereo compressor that hasn't been made in 25 years.

You've just done the greatest sales job. I'm ready to go out and buy this product. It just sounds awesome.
I'm glad. The man-hours involved, to be able to do these presets, was pretty staggering. Because you have to basically go in and do essentially finished mixes--six sets of finished mixes--for every drum kit, for every individual drum times 19. Say that you lay a set of drums into a track, you're working along with it, but say now you want to try a different set of drums. Well, with our system, you can just call up a different set of drums, and all the balances will stay exactly the same. The mix won't change. Everything is the same. So that you can actually go through various drum kits, and you're mix is still completely together. Most times, you call a different drum set, and all the levels will be different, often, completely different. So yeah, it was much more of a fight, shall we say. A lot of guys who have small, home studios, they don't necessarily have the outboard gear or the processing, everything required to really go in and finesse a finished mix. So if I can hand them something that's really close to that, and of course they can alter it any way they want, but they're already starting from a place so far ahead of where they would be if it was from scratch.

Did you bring any star drummers in to work on it?
Not really. I used two great drummers to do all of my hits, because apart from rolls, and certain kinds of cymbal work, a lot of it is straight hits. The other issue is—and it's obviously a labor-intensive thing--the question of how many levels it required on a given snare, in all the various positions on that snare, and that each one has to be, for me, sonically perfect. We use the Sonic Reality mapping system, so that when you play it on V-drums, or you play it on a keyboard, or use MIDI loops to play it, I defy you to determine that it's not real drums. I don't believe you could ever determine that it was samples. I've always been into making sounds as impressive as I can possibly make them. Bill and I were into the same set of stuff. We were both sound nuts. And Bill never lost that. Bill was as into it when he was 60 as he was when he was 20.

You have other Ocean Way branded products. You have your line of monitors.
That’s right. We have our high-end monitor systems.

How is that doing?
That's been very successful. We partner up with GC Pro, our exclusive distributor and we have been very successful. We did a set for Dave Grohl and his personal studio, which I helped design. He's just a great guy, a totally fun guy. And we have a set at Skywalker Ranch, in their scoring stage, a multichannel setup. We did a set for the Disney executive conference room for Hollywood Records. They needed a situation where they could have playbacks for A&R people and executive promotion people, where they could all hear the same sound for a dozen people. So I redesigned their room, and installed those speakers for them. And we just did a set in Las Vegas, in North Carolina. We also did a set for Trevor Horn's studios in London and Rob Cavalo's private studio.

Did you have to think a long time about deciding to do products, or did it just come naturally as the next thing to do?
I've always been a speaker buff. Apart from being a recording engineer/musician, I've always totally been into speakers. And actually so was Bill--speakers were probably the thing he loved the most. When he came down to my studio for the first time and heard the loudspeakers, I think he was fairly amazed, because you would never expect to see anything like that in a recording studio. In fact, I'm not sure you'd even see it anywhere. What I had in my garage control room, my monitors were 8 feet high, and 3 feet wide--each speaker, which was a little unusual for a control room at that period of time. But I've always enjoyed that end of things, so we've always done this. It has been more of a sideline, though we are taking it much more seriously now. You know, this business has changed dramatically. Three quarters of the people that I knew in this business ten years ago are now doing other things--but luckily for us, Ocean Way, we do the high-end acts that tour, and they make a lot of revenue touring, and they need albums to support their tours. So we're sort of like one of the last of the high-end studios, and business is very, very good. I really don't see anything changing for us. We have seven rooms in Los Angeles, seven studios and a mastering room. And we're still very involved with Ocean Way Nashville, which has three rooms. We're also in the middle of designing and building a new room. We bought some additional property behind us in Hollywood, and we're building another room right now.

That's so good to hear, since there’re so many studios going down. I like to hear positive stuff about the music industry. But back to the library, it just seems like there are so many people now, even small indie bands that have recording deals, that are basically recording at home, but then they have to go rent a big room to lay down their drums. But maybe now they don't have to. They're the perfect customers for this product.
Yeah, like--you know Walter A.? Very successful producer…

Afanasieff?
Yeah. Walter Afanasieff, when he bought a set from me--he's already done like three projects with it, and he says he's just never heard anything like it. He's a phenomenal "keyboard drummer." Just ridiculous. He says it sounds like the mikes are coming in live when you listen to the individual elements.

Another interesting thing I found putting together this sort of thing: Obviously it's a learning process. When I did the initial group of samples, then cut them all together and assembled them into a format that you can test and use, what I found was that the system and the format and the way people do that is very degrading sonically. It requires a multiplicity of digital steps that although some people will tell you there's no loss--there's a tremendous loss. So what happened is, when I did the first group of tests, I got my finished products, and I'm comparing it to the original, live, 96k samples, and there's no comparison. It sounds awful. So we had to recut everything, and come up with an entirely new way of assembling it into the finished product that involved far fewer steps, and a different way of approaching it digitally. That made a huge difference in the finished sonic product. So that's, I think, another thing that makes our sample library a little bit different.

 Questions or comments on this article?