Video: Al Green's Super Dry Soul Drums | What's That Sound?

For this week's episode of our What's That Sound series, Noam and Jessica take on the instantly recognizable drum sound of a quintessential '70s soul classic: Al Green's "Let's Stay Together". Produced and engineered by the late, great Willie Mitchell at the Memphis soul powerhouse Royal Recording Studios, the drums on Green's signature single were performed by Al Jackson Jr. and Howard Grimes.

Drums in the Style of Al Green's Let's Stay Together
Drums in the Style of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together"
By Reverb
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Produced and engineered by the late, great Willie Mitchell at the Memphis soul powerhouse Royal Recording Studios, the drums on Green's signature single were performed by Al Jackson Jr. and Howard Grimes.

To get the sound of this AM radio classic right, the name of the game is tape machines and treatments: indeed, there was lots of dampening and baffling involved.

This time around, we used a Ludwig Classic Maple 20”x14” kick drum without the front head, a pillow for muffling, and a soft beater on the pedal—this was captured with an Electro-Voice RE20.

We pointed a Neumann KM84 at the side of the shell of our vintage Ludwig snare—also muffled with a wallet—to capture the "crack".

For cymbals, we used a 21” Zildjian K-Sweet Ride, as well as a 14” K-Dark Zildjian top hat and 14” K-Sweet Zildjian bottom hat with fabric in between to muffle. Jessica also choked up on her hi-hat stick to play quieter.

As we were tuning the drums and listening to the original recording as a reference, we noticed that they tuned all of the drums to the key of the song—we followed suit with our Gretsch tom and overdubbed conga drums respectively.

The solitary overhead mic—this time, our trusty Neumann U47 clone built by Bill Bradley, The Mic Shop MS-47—was capturing the majority of the sound for both the kit and the congas. We placed it further back on the kit, closer to the snare than the cymbals, and slightly lower than usual to get less cymbals and room sound.


Congas DAW LP Congas Fabfilter Drums post tape DAW LP Drums post tape Fabfilter Drums post tape HLF3C Drums post tape MEQ5 Drums post tape UAD Hitsville Mastering EQ Kick Pultec EQ1PA Kick SSL OH EQ1PA OH Fabfilter ProQ3 OH MEQ5 OH SSL Snare EQ1PA Snare MEQ5 Snare SSL

Once the drums were tracked, Noam treated the takes with a 4-band Pultec EQ—while there's no confirmation on whether or not they were used on the original recording, they were relatively popular at the time, particularly for drum treatments that require simultaneous boosting and cutting. After that, everything was mixed down to 2 tracks on a tape machine at a dark 15 IPS—one for the kick, the other for the overhead and snare signal, recorded right at the cusp of distortion and all mixed down to mono. Check out the above plug-in screenshots to see exactly how these drums were processed and treated.

Was our recreation good or bad, happy or sad? Watch the video above and hear for yourself.

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