Feb 22, 2010 5:25 PM, By Barbara Schultz

A CAREER OF CLASSIC TRACKS

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Ken Scott’s EpiK Drum SoundS

The drum sounds on Sonic Reality’s A Ken Scott Collection—Epik Drums were created using as close a match of environment, acoustics, equipment and technique as Scott could assemble. Most importantly, he was able to work with the original drummers from several of his best-known projects: Terry Bozzio of Missing Persons, Woody Woodmansey of David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars, Bill Cobham of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Rod Morgenstein of Dixie Dregs and Bob Siebenberg of Supertramp. Two years in the making, the collection is distributed as a hard drive containing more than 130 GB of drum sounds.

“I chose five very distinct drum sounds from my past,” Scott says. “I contacted all of the original drummers, and they all jumped at the idea.” Scott and the developers then went about finding out where they could use Trident A Range boards in acoustical environments that were as close as possible to the studios they’d worked in decades ago.

“We rented all of the same mics I would have used,” Scott says, “basically 67s, and rented drum kits as close as we could to the originals. The biggest problem there was for Bill Cobham and Rod Morgenstein, because they used Fibes drum kits, which are now out of business.

“First, the drummers were playing along with tracks that I had recorded with them and I worked on getting the sound as close as we possibly could to the original. Then we had them play as they originally had, then modify their playing a bit, and then we just let them go. They were absolutely phenomenal. Rod Morgenstein would go for 15 minutes at a time. I had the easy part of the task.”

“Now consider, most of them are 30 to 40 years older than they were, but they’ve got to try to play the same way they did back then,” Scott continues. “Their styles have changed since then, but that was great, because going back to that, they were playing it fresh. It was exciting for them again. But they were going for hours on end with very few breaks. The sweat was going everywhere. It was amazing.

The drum sounds exist as whole-kit sounds, as 3-track mixes, and as individual pieces, where mics are isolated so that users can create their own drum mixes. “A lot of engineers today have never recorded a real drum kit,” Scott says. “We want the collection to be used both as a tool for people to be able to use the sounds and a stable of recordings—from the English glam-rock Bowie sound to the jazz fusion things of Cobham and everything in between—so that engineers can quickly, if they know what they’re after, zero in on specific drum sounds and/or parts very quickly.

Scott plans to record a collection of bass sounds next. However, he points out that, “Anyone can use the same techniques that I use, but it’s going to come out differently, because we hear things slightly differently, and we change minute things; we couldn’t even describe what we change. We just do it instinctively and it comes out the way we want it to. That’s what makes a classic track.”

For more information, go to www.epikdrums.com.

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