Recreate the Arctic Monkeys' Drum Sound | What's That Sound?

Drums in the Style of Arctic Monkeys' R U Mine
Drums in the Style of Arctic Monkeys' "R U Mine?"
By Reverb
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For this week's episode of What's That Sound, Noam and Jessica take on a recreation of one of our most requested songs: Arctic Monkeys' 2012 single "R U Mine?". Produced by Ross Orton and mixed by Tchad Blake, this drum track lays it on thick, dry, and powerful.

Compared to previous episodes, there's not a lot of studio trickery this time around—instead, the focus is on a delicate, accurate balance between the drums, emphasizing their tuning, and making sure that they're well-recorded. That in mind, we used our trusty ‘70s Vintage Gretsch kit and a Ludwig Supralite Snare with a Big Fat Snare Drum “Puck” for dampening. For cymbals, we used a pair of 14” K-Dark Zildjian Hi Hats, a 18” Zildjian K-Dark Crash, and a 21” Zildjian K-Sweet Ride.

As far as microphones are concerned, we relied on a few pairs—the Schoeps V4 U for our overheads and the AEA A840 for our room mics—while both toms and the snare bottom each received their own AKG C414. To capture as little hi-hat as possible, we pointed a Beyerdynamic M 201 TG on the snare top known for its tight polar pattern. Finally, for our kick microphones we used an Kick-in: AKG D12 for our "in" and a Sennheiser 421 for the out.


Drum Bus Kick In Kick Out Kick Sans Amp OH Rooms Snare Bot Snare Sans Amp Snare Top Toms

The low-end has been filtered out of all the microphones across board barring the exception of our kick-out 421, which provides us with the track's signature thump. For both the kick and the snare, we took the same cue from the Tchad Blake playbook that we used on our recreation of "Tighten Up" by the Black Keys: running it through a Tech21 SansAmp pedal in parallel for some added distortion and saturation. For a detailed look at Noam's EQ and processing settings, check out the screenshots above.

How did we do with recreating this Arctic Monkeys modern classic? Suck it and see the video above.

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