GARBAGE COMPRESSION
One of the not-so-secret pieces of outboard that has helped define Garbage’s sound is the Roger Mayer RM58 compressor. Butch and Billy swear by it for drums.
Butch: “If you listen to the drums on the end of Amends, they’re hammered through the Roger Mayer, which blows them out in a cool way. Whenever the drums get really loud, like on Empty, it’s probably mixed in 50% on one of the buses.
“I found it when I was producing Sonic Youth’s album Dirty in New York City. The engineer, John Siket, knew this gear broker who had a bunch of weird gear out in Brooklyn. I went out to his pad and he said, ‘You should try out this compressor, man.’ It was a $500 solid state compressor. I took it to the studio, plugged it in, and to me, it made everything sound like early The Who records. It had this wild, but cool, crunchy out of control sound. So I bought it. I’ve used it on so many records, but it’s got a specific sound, so you either have to embrace it or not.”
Billy: “Roger Mayer made these compressors in the late ’60s when he was making a bunch of console parts around New York. They’re super fast solid state compressors that admittedly don’t really sound great. I called Roger Mayer up about it and he said, ‘Why would you want to use that?’ When you put it in the most extreme settings, it’s got the most glorious drum sound. We scoured the planet for these things and we’ve got three of them now, Butch has got one and I’ve got two. They’re beat to hell, the VU meters don’t work, and it only ever works when everything’s cranked to 10. If you run it as a parallel compressor on the kick, snare and toms, and a little bit of room mic, it creates this sound I haven’t heard on anything else.”
