A missing cymbal accidentally invented the drum sound of the 1980s
An engineer's talkback microphone, a broken drummer's kit, and one noise gate produced an effect nobody was trying to make.
In 1979, engineer Hugh Padgham and producer Steve Lillywhite were recording Peter Gabriel's third solo album at Townhouse Studios in London. Phil Collins sat behind the drums, playing without cymbals at Gabriel's request. What happened next is usually described as an accident, though it took someone paying close attention to actually notice it.
The studio's talkback microphone — the one built for the engineer to speak to musicians through their headphones, not to record anything — happened to run through a heavy compressor and a noise gate, a piece of equipment designed to cut off any sound below a certain volume. When that mic picked up the raw, cymbal-free drum hits, the compressor made them enormous, and the gate sliced the reverb tail off cleanly instead of letting it decay naturally. The result was a drum sound that didn't resemble any room a drum kit had ever actually been in: huge, then gone, with nothing in between.
Lillywhite and Padgham had already been circling something like it on other sessions — with Siouxsie and the Banshees, and with XTC — but Gabriel's album is where it crystallized. Two years later, Padgham used the same trick on Collins's own song "In the Air Tonight," and gated reverb became one of the defining sounds of a decade, copied on records that had nothing else in common with where it came from.
Nobody set out to build that sound. Someone left a signal path open that was never meant to be heard, and then had the sense to listen to it anyway.