Chris Sheldon is a producer and mix engineer who has worked with the likes of Foo Fighters, Feeder, Radiohead and Pixies.

He also worked on Biffy Clyro’s first three albums, each of which has a song featured in my influences playlist. The tracks can be found at the bottom of this entry.

I added the three Biffy Clyro tracks to my playlist because I thought YCIALM sounded similar to some of their early material. Having listened to YCIALM’s previous recordings, they are produced in a similar style to the early work of Biffy Clyro, so I wanted to try to recreate some of the techniques used.

Finding information on how Blackened Sky, The Vertigo of Bliss and Infinity Land were produced has proved problematic because of the less popular nature of Biffy Clyro’s earlier material however there is information on the techniques that the producer of these albums, Chris Sheldon uses. “I worked on Biffy Clyro’s first three albums and even though those albums weren’t particularly commercially successful, they’re still getting me work.” (Speakhertz)

An article on ‘The Audio Hunt’ called ‘Want Your Drums To Pop? Learn the ‘Chris Sheldon Method’ displays several techniques used by Sheldon when recording and mixing drums.

The first step, according to the article is to fully ensure the kit sounds good before you record. This is pretty standard but easy to forget.

• “Bass Drum would be a Neumann FET 47 and an AKG D112 – one inside halfway between the heads and one just outside the outer head. These can take a lot of pressure which makes them ideally suited for this purpose.”
• “Snare Drum. I am a sucker for a Shure 57 (or 58 with the pop shield unscrewed). It generally gives me what I want and can deal with the high pressure from the drum, plus it can a take beating from an inaccurate player! I normally have the mic around 1 inch or so from the head, and I would also mic up the underneath to pick up some of the rattle. This will help bring out some of the high end on the snare too.”
• “On Toms, I would generally use Sennheiser MD421 mics on the batter skin and AKG 414’s underneath to bring out the tone. It’s important to also flip the phase between these two mics.”
• “Hi-Hats would be a Neumann KM84 and probably the same on the Ride cymbal. It amazes me how many people do not spot-mic the ride, but for me it’s a must. You can filter out a fair amount of bottom on both these mics, it’s not really useful and can cloud things up.”
• “Cymbal or Overhead mic-ing would be a pair of Neumann 87s or equivalent.”
• “For the Ambience, I will always use two Room mics maybe 15 feet back from the kit and 15’ between them, in addition to a Centre mic placed a little bit closer. For the pair, I would ideally use Coles ribbon mics or something similar.” (TheAudioHunt)

It seems to me that Chris Sheldon’s mic’ing techniques for drums are directly opposed to those used by Butch Vig. Where Vig focuses on simplicity and performance to get a great capture of the drum kit, Sheldon uses a large selection of mics to ensure a high-quality recording. The microphones he chooses to use are mostly expensive and difficult to get hold of so I may need to substitute them for other mics when booking equipment. The D112 is a microphone that I have always used for kick drum and I’ll do so again. Using C414s on the toms lines up with how Butch Vig recorded drums on Siamese Dream so I will also do this. This will mean that my microphone setup will be condenser microphone-heavy, which hopefully will capture a range of different tones from the drum kit. I have always used an SM57 or two on the snare drum and will do so again, as Sheldon does. I have never mic’d the bottom of a tom, which is something that Sheldon seems to do and I think this contradicts Vig’s idea of simplicity when recording. I could also run into some phasing issues. For these reasons I’ll only be mic’ing the top skin of the toms. The use of condenser mics on hi-hats and ride cymbals is something that, while I’ve done before, I have not done in my more recent projects. I aim to do this in order to capture as much of the kit as I can, to better my own drum recordings. A pair of condenser mics as overheads goes without saying though I will not be able to use Neumann 87s, and will make alternate arrangements. Using three room mics again seems a little extravagant for my own personal tastes but I could potentially experiment with this, while I will likely settle for one in the centre of the kit or two either side. While Vig and Sheldon have contrasting methods for recording drums, I will aim to use techniques employed by both to record my drums.

Mixing drums

Again, Sheldon shows a fondness for using compression to bring out dynamism on the drum kit. I’ll experiment with the following techniques in the mixing stage.

“Mixing the kit will most likely require you to EQ again to make the kit fit with the bass and guitars, but this is where you can also use compression to really make the kit thump.”

“Don’t go crazy! An over-compressed kit will sound smaller than one with none”

“Room mics can benefit from a touch of compression to give you a bigger sound when they’re trying to compete with raging guitars. It’s also worth compressing the kick and snare drum, but again, don’t overdo it.”

One trick I always use is to run the recorded snare drum back through a mic amp and overload it to distort the signal, then record this back to another track. This has the side effect of bringing out harmonics and tones that can be very useful for infusing some life back into the kit when the other instruments are taking up room in the mix. You won’t need much (just a few dB’s), but it will really help.”  (TheAudioHunt)

Mixing Vocals

On mixing vocals and adding a lot of compression, Sheldon notes that “well, I think it brings character. ” I decided to experiment with that and have ended up doing some of that too. Kate Bush used to have tons of it on her vocals. It’s all about how you set it up. You might start with slow compressor, to let the consonants ring through and follow it up with a hard brick-wall limiter at the end, to push everything. If you’re careful with it, it gives you the ability to set the vocal where you want it in the mix. Of course, I’m mainly talking about noisy ass rock music. If its a ballad or a quieter song, it won’t be suitable for that. In full on rock songs, you don’t want a huge dynamic range on vocals, the vocal needs sit firmly in the middle of everything. So by limiting the dynamic range, you can make sure that it’s neither overbearing, nor hidden, although this does mean that you bring out a lot of sibilance and the consonants become very hard, but this is very easily dealt with.” I will pay close attention to these notes while mixing the vocals on the EP. When I’ve mixed vocals in the past I’ve treated processing and effects as necessities rather than creative choices, so I will attempt to try something a little different to what I have previously done.

https://www.theaudiohunt.com/blog/want-your-drums-to-pop-learn-the-chris-sheldon-method