RaDical ReCorDing

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You never really lose trying these things, because a lot of what you’re doing is getting everyone excited. Even if it doesn’t work out, 10 minutes later you may get the best take of the record, because everyone is feeling in such good spirits.
—Dave Sardy

Back in those days, it took a courageous drummer to work with Sardy, who was often intent on using the environment to create the drum sound. “Some people just record dry and then mess around with it afterward,” he remarks. “I tend to record stuff to tape the way I want it to sound. When I first started, I never had any money to collect microphones or effects, so everything had to be organic. I’ve put drummers in closets and in vocal iso booths that were so small you had to use a floor tom for the kick drum and just one overhead mic. For one project, we got a really cool sound when we taped a PZM mic to the drummer’s back and had him pound his chest in time with the kick drum. For a while I was living in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse with almost nothing in it; we recorded a lot of cool drums in there, just experimenting with close and far mics. And the first studio I ever worked at had a four-story steep marble stairway that was great to set the drummer up on using a mic at either end for the stereo.”

Not all endeavors turn out well, of course: For example, there was that disappointing venture into an empty swimming pool. “That one didn’t sound as good as I thought it would,” Sardy recalls sadly. “But that happens sometimes with insane setups—they look a lot better than they sound. All that work to set a guy up in the pool, and it just sounded like a drum kit with a bad MidiVerb on it. Concrete, I learned, is not the nicest sound in the world.”

Still, those experiments are rarely regretted. “You never really lose trying these things,” he notes, “because a lot of what you’re doing is getting everyone excited. Even if it doesn’t work out, 10 minutes later you may get the best take of the record, because everyone is feeling in such good spirits.”

A mansion in the hills, a large budget and plenty of time: For a producer like Sardy, Marilyn Manson’s Holy Wood project was a dream—or a nightmare—come true. What was the real deal with those U67s left out in the rain? “They were the mics that were right by the door when it started pouring, so we used them,” he says. “We were already recording [guitarist] John5 playing an acoustic outside so we’d have the traffic in the background. All of a sudden, the sky opened up with a thunderstorm, which is so rare in L.A. We were in a canyon, so it was reverberating all over the place—an amazing moment. You can hear it in the song ‘Valentine’s Day.’” (While you’re listening, see if you can hear the moment when Sardy and his crew relented and threw plastic bags over the 67s in the hopes of salvaging them.)

Microphones were sacrificed to both fire and rain on “Valentine’s Day,” as Manson screamed into a burning microphone at the “Fall of Adam” section. “It sounds like he’s singing into a walkie-talkie, but it’s actually a tiny old desk microphone,” Sardy notes. “We doused it with lighter fluid, put it in front of him and set it on fire. The last moment of that microphone’s life was Marilyn screaming his head off a couple of inches from it.”

“Disposable” microphones are a regular part of Sardy’s arsenal. “I’m the guy who at the swap meets sees someone with a pile of old microphones and says, ‘How much for the whole pile?’ A really easy way to vibe things up on a session is to use messed up old microphones in tandem with really good ones. If you put a C12 and a screwed up microphone right next to each other, a singer can hear the difference when he or she moves their head. They can get into playing around with those different sounds themselves, as opposed to you doing it all.

“What it comes down to,” he concludes, “is that you’re trying to create an environment where the band feels like they’re in their bedroom. At a live show, you have the energy and excitement of the crowd, but the studio is an abstract environment and not always the most conducive to creativity. It can feel like you’re performing under a microscope. So what you want to do is make people feel comfortable, get everybody’s energy up and have fun.”

Maureen Droney is Mix’s L.A. editor.

Reprinted with permission from

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