“She Drives Me Crazy” is a song recorded by the Fine Young Cannibals, included on their 1989 album The Raw and the Cooked. The song peaked at #5 as a single in the band’s native UK in January 1989 (it was released on New Year’s Day) before hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US on 15 April 1989. It also reached #3 on the Dutch Top 40.
Some of the most memorable snare sounds of the 80s had actually not much in common with a normal snare drum. Whereas the 60s and 70s were most of the time all about capturing real sounds as faithfully as possible, the digital revolution of the 80s pushed the engineers, musicians and producers to use and abuse new tools, and compete against each other to create unheard, adventurous new sounds. Now it’s your turn to explore new territories by layering original sounds underneath your snare. Use short analog bleeps, electro claps, tom samples, cross-stick sounds, found sounds… The fun part starts when you use some of the techniques described above on these layers! For inspiration, read how engineer David Z created one of the most memorable snare sound of the 80s for Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy”: “I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he says. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.” But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record, and in becoming, along with Gift’s vocals, the signature of the song, it would go on to have many lives of its own subsequent to the single’s run up the charts.” source: mixonline.com