On the song “London Calling,” Price recorded the stereo ambience mix on tracks 17 and 18 (see track sheet) and recorded the same ambience mix to tracks 7 and 8, but gated through Kepex gates and triggered by the snare mic. “The original Kepexes didn’t work very well,” says Price. “They had these neon lamps that indicated how much they were gating, and when the lamps switched on and off it put a click on the signal—they were pretty lousy devices. In those days, if I managed to get them working, I used to record it on tape. If I was doing it now, I would apply the gates on the monitor and then reproduce it on the mix, but in those days, if you could get it to work, it was well worth recording it.”

Having a gated ambience track gave Price complete control over the snare ambience. “Depending on how loud the snare was, I could balance the snare in the overall ambience by using the gated ambience,” he explains. “If the snare was too ambient, I could reverse the phase of the gated ambience tracks and reduce the amount of snare ambience, which I’ve done on occasion. It works very well.”

For the close mics on Clash drummer Topper Headon’s kit, Price used both a Shure SM57 and a Neumann KM86 on the snare, Sennheiser 421s on the toms and AKG 451s on the cymbals. Headon’s kit had two hi-hats, which were miked with Neumann KM84s, but because he only played one hi-hat on “London Calling,” the one on track 9 was subsequently wiped. On the bass drum, Price used both a dynamic AKG D-12, placed inside the shell, and a Neumann U47 tube condenser placed just outside.

Using a tube condenser to mike a kick drum was, at one time, unheard of and would definitely have been frowned on at Decca Studios, where Price first began his engineering career. “The older guys at Decca, the people that I learned from, used to laugh at me for putting a mic on the bass drum at all,” recalls Price. “They used to say to me, ‘the object of the bass drum is to keep the band in time—it’s not meant to be heard.’ They did teach me a lot, but that was one of the things they told me that I didn’t believe.”

In 1979, Wessex was equipped with 3M M79, 24-track recorders and the house standard was Ampex 406 tape with Dolby A, but Price recorded the drum tracks for “London Calling” without Dolby. “When I was working at Wessex within just the one studio or even going between the two rooms at Wessex, I never had any problems with Dolbys,” he recalls. “But as soon as I started being more independent, doing backing tracks in one studio and then going to another studio and doing overdubs, things were just horrendous—things just sounded wrong, particularly transient things like the drums. Sometimes I’d get the technical department in, and they would say ‘plus four,’ and I would say ‘minus six,’ and they would say ‘are you talking dBv or dBu,’ and I would find these people didn’t speak the same language as me. So I never really got to the bottom of whether it was to do with alignment or whether there was something more subtle going on. The only reason I used to use Dolby on bands like The Clash is that I used to do a lot of composites. If I did a vocal on three or four tracks and mixed it down to another track, obviously the tape hiss got much worse, so it was a good idea to Dolby it. But I wasn’t going to do that with the drums, because they would be recorded on however many tracks and would stay there until the final mix. So I used to switch the Dolby off on the drums.”

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, November, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved