Photo: Wyatt Sardy
American‑born producer, engineer and mixer Dave Sardy has worked with household names including Bush, Johnny Cash, Oasis and the Who. A favourite sound from this impressive discography is the guitar drone on ‘(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady’ from Oasis’ 2008 album Dig Out Your Soul.
“I loved the song when Noel Gallagher first played it for me, he had a kind of a drone string vibe happening with the way he was playing it on the guitar. He writes a lot on acoustic guitar, so he’ll just sit and play acoustic guitar and sing the song a bunch of times to rehearse and warm up his voice. So, you get an idea of what the song is. With this song he was kind of droning on this one string throughout the song, which gave me the idea of using the technique of sympathetic vibrations — the harmonic phenomenon wherein a passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness.
“Knowing that, I got his guitar, which was a Gibson acoustic, and tuned it all to a chord in the key of the song. I then took his guitar and put it through a Neve Melbourne sidecar console. Because we were at Abbey Road in Studio 2, and because we wanted that punchy Neve sound, I brought over my own Neve Melbourne — which is a 12‑channel sidecar — from the States and set it up next to the EMI REDD console. The studio also had a Neve VR console, which we basically used as a table and monitor controller.”
Drone Warfare
“To achieve this sound, I had the acoustic guitar set up on a stand on top of the console, and had the drum beat playing from the song onto the speaker, going directly onto the back of the body of his acoustic guitar, where I had a Neumann KM84 mic set up close to the guitar strings, using the monitor speakers to create the vibrations. The KM84 gave it a very focused sound.
"I then DI’ed it out of the acoustic as well and sent that to a Vox Super Beatle amp in the live room. Because the KM84 is a really small capsule, it makes the perfect mic for this type of close‑mic approach. You need the guitar vibrating and the speaker triggering it, but without getting too much of the speaker. So, you kind of need a really tight‑pattern microphone.
Dave Sardy: Everything turns into a vibration, giving you this sort of beautiful droning sound that is created out of the rhythm and the key of the song.
“We did a bunch of different takes and kept re‑recording it. After four or five iterations, it becomes this sound that has overtones of the room that you’re in, so everything turns into a vibration, giving you this sort of beautiful droning sound that is created out of the rhythm and the key of the song. The finished sound ends up sounding a little like a synth, a drone synth, which it’s not. It’s all created out of that guitar vibrating and the song being played into the guitar and then resonating and being recorded over and over again.”