Chris Kimsey's Compressor Setup for the Snappy Dry Drums on 'Some Girls'

For the Some Girls sessions at Pathé Marconi in Paris, engineer Chris Kimsey wanted drums that hit hard and stayed dry — no gated reverb, no room bloom. He achieved that by running the entire drum submix through a single UREI 1176LN limiter, set with a fast attack (around 3–4) and fast release (around 4–5), and hitting the input hard enough to get 6–8 dB of gain reduction.

The 1176’s all-buttons-in mode was avoided; Kimsey preferred the standard ratio of 4:1 or 8:1, which tightened the transients without squashing the snare’s crack. The result was a compressed, almost monophonic drum sound that sat right in the center of the mix — no spill, no slapback, just the kit punching through. This treatment gave Charlie Watts’s snare that signature staccato attack, especially on tracks like “Miss You” and “Shattered.”