Used for the drums on Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, as stated by mix engineer Rich Costey in this March 2008 Sound on Sound interview.

Drums: Quad 8 310, Pultec EQP1, API 550a, Neve 33609, API 2500, Lexicon 960, Urei 1176, Smart C2, SPL Transient Designer, room mics

"I had just gotten some Quad 8 310 EQs before I began the Foo Fighters project, and I found that cranking the s[**]t out of the mid-range with the Quads helped the drums quite a lot. On most of the album the bass and snare drum went through the Quad 8s, with severe amounts of mid-range added. Quad 8 grew out of Electrodyne and was very popular in the 1970s, particularly with film companies. I obtained some channels that came out of the Motown Sunrise console and they're basically three bands of EQ and a mic pre and output level, and the Q gets tighter as you push it up. The Quad 8s are a little bit rounder and warmer-sounding than similar API modules. I also used the Pultec EQP1 and API 550a on the bass drum.

"I had a bunch of different side-chain compressors on the drums that would change from song to song. On some songs it would be the Smart C2, medium ratio and fast recovery, on others the Neve 33609, the Urei 1176, the API 2500 or the Empirical Labs Distressor, and the SPL Transient Designer on toms. You can use the SPL to lengthen the sound of the toms. I don't compress all the drums at the same time, I'll compress individual parts and mix the compressed sound in with the natural sound of the drums. There was relatively little compression implemented on the drums in this song, because the band didn't care for it. They wanted the drums to sound more raw.

"Throughout the album mix I might have used a bit of Lexicon 960 on the drums for reverb, but the room mics — amongst them a heavily compressed foldback microphone — were so good that I tended to use those. I tend to like room mics that are on the darker side. If they're too bright, you can't turn them up very loud because you then also get all kinds of messy cymbal noises. One other thing to note is the drums that come in after the intro of the song. When the whole band is slamming accents like that, you want to make the drums sound very aggressive, and this meant pushing room mics, pushing compression mics and so forth. As I said, there were a lot of rides."

There were no plug?ins in their computer, so I installed several that I needed to work. I also made them buy some outboard [two Chandler Germanium compressors and an Alan Smart C2] and a PreSonus FaderPort, to work easier.”

"Alan Smart C2 compressor" is included in the list of equipment at Stuart Price's studio.

Used for "Makes Me Wonder", as stated by mix engineer Mark Endert in this September 2007 Sound on Sound interview.

Drums: Alan Smart C2, SSL EQ, Lexicon 480L, Tube–Tech LCA 2B, Logic Compressor, Waves PS22 Spreader, Focusrite D2, Tech 21 Comptortion, URS A–Series EQ.

“Basically I wanted the drums to sound fat and loud. A lot of processing on the drums is done on the SSL, using EQ and compression. I also love the Alan Smart C2 compressor, and I bussed things like the kick and the snare to the C2 and returned them on two separate channels. They really are spanked pretty hard, so it really punches up the drums. The C2 is set to ‘crush’ mode, which completely annihilates all the transients and brings up the air. Like with most of my stuff, I’m sure the attack was set pretty fast, to probably 1ms, and the release was pretty fast as well, again to bring up the air. It was a completely crushed sound that I blended in sparingly. I used some Lexicon 480L reverb on the drums, and the three room mics were hit really hard with a Tube–Tech LCA 2B compressor to bring up yet more air. My drum loop also had serious compression, but I think that was done in Logic, using either their Platinum or their regular compressor. I didn’t add anything to the loop during the mix.

“I added a lot of bottom to all the drums, even before they hit the SSL. I had programmed a clap sample in Logic, but I felt that I couldn’t really hear it above the snare, so I put it through the PS22 Spreader and suddenly it was there. I also EQ’d the claps very severely with the Focusrite D2 plug–in, boosting around 80 and 134 and shelving some top off above 12K. I wanted the beats to be fat, without too much transience. I was trying to see whether the claps could withstand having lots of bottom added, and it sounded good."

According to a list of equipment which is used in his studio, Crowdspacer, Joakim is also a user of Alan Smart C2 compressor.

Used for the kick and snare on The Seldom Seen Kid: Live at Abbey Road, as mentioned by producer Rupert Flindt in this 2019 Sound on Sound interview.

"Once you get a load of multiple mics out, compression becomes a real beast, because it alters spill continually. With a multitracked rock recording, you can compress things perfectly for each track, but the minute you've got two compressors going in the same room on two mics, when this guy plays his level's there — fine — he stops playing, whoop, up goes his gain and the spill floods across, so all sorts of weirdnesses happen. You'll find this if you're doing a vocal and a guitar: if you start putting in your standard vocal compression, when you stop singing, the guitar sound goes weird. So in this show there was a limited amount of compression. I used Al Smart C2 on kick and snare, mono on each, I used Urei 1176s on the vocals, and a little bit of desk compression on the keyboard parts — really as a safety net, because live keyboard players can be unpredictable."