Today’s loop is dedicated to Richard Starkey aka Ringo Star. Ringo was the drummer in an underground pop band from the 60′s called The Beatles. I highly recommend going to your local vinyl shop and digging for some of their albums.
Why am I dedicating this to Ringo? Because Ringo came up with the ingenious idea of placing towels on top of his drums when recording in the studio. This technique resulted in the signature “Ringo sound” which was prevalent in their later albums; flat, punchy and ultra compressed. It is also my guess that Ringo used these towels to dry himself when playing drums on the beach. Talk about resourceful.
Loop #2
I took Ringo’s towel technique and ran with it on this one. Using close mic’ing on all of the drums, I cranked up the compressor and panned the toms hard left and right. Finally, I pulled out the bit-crusher and smashed things up a bit. The final result: This sounds absolutely nothing like Ringo but more like something Pharrell would produce after spilling Moët all over the console. Yet again, another reason to have towels in the studio.
Preview Here:
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Download the Logic files here. (10MB)
125 BPM
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Yeah, dude. Nice work. You’ve inspired me to get my blog together.
this is a great loop! now i’m definitely staying tune for future ones.
For the record, Ringo reportedly used “tea towels”, which are normally made of thin linen, which I would think would muffle the sound of the snare and toms in a less aggressive way. Try again with handkerchiefs.
Great sound nonetheless!