Taylor Hawkins

Used for the bass drum on "The Pretender", as stated by mix engineer Rich Costey in this March 2008 Sound on Sound interview. An image of the settings for bandmate Dave Grohl's intro vocals shows that it is the Bomb Factory plugin.

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."