Manual

1:3 Recording notes
BFD2’s sounds were recorded in studio 1 at AIR Studios at
Lyndhurst Hall, Hampstead, London.
AIR Studios was started in 1969 by George Martin, a producer
famous for his work with The Beatles.
It moved to its present location at Lyndhurst Hall, a stunning
grade II listed converted church in Hampstead, in 1991. It
offers one of the best live rooms in the UK.
Studio 1’s recording room could be described as medium
to large sized. It consists mainly of wooden surfaces with
excellent dispersion characteristics and a fast decaying
‘explosive’ sounding reverb quality.
The size of the room offers a lot of options when recording,
with very different reverb characteristics depending on the
position and height of ambience microphones.
This room was portioned into a slightly smaller space more appropriate for drum recording, without losing its lush reverberant
sound.
The mixing console in the studio 1 control room is a rather special custom Neve featuring ‘AIR Montserrat’ mic preamps. It was
designed in 1989 by Rupert Neve with consultation from George Martin, and is a classic fully-discrete Neve design offering a
bandwidth of 100 kHz.
Personnel
All sounds were recorded and edited by Gareth Green, with engineering assistance from Kevin Hay.
Drumming duties were shared between Emre Ramazonoglu and Darrin Mooney, both respected and experienced session players.
Kit preparation and tuning
During the sessions, the primary objective was to capture the instruments as organically and powerfully as possible, while covering
different kinds of voicing and tuning. A lot of the drums, especially the vintage kits, have loose hardware and other supposed
flaws. These have all been retained, as there really is nothing worse than sterile, characterless drums.
The drums, hihats and cymbals themselves are a mixture of modern, vintage and
custom instruments.
The library includes two historic and famous kits. Firstly, a classic Ludwig ‘Spiral’ Vistalite
that was once owned and played by the late John Bonham and, secondly, Ringo
Starr’s Blue Oyster Ludwig kit that was used on a number of classic albums.
The other instruments in the library were selected to offer a wide tonal and stylistic
range, from the modern, tight punch of the DW Collector’s Series to the warm, rounded
tones of the vintage Gretsch Round-badge kit. We even managed to drag our ‘house
kit’ at FX HQ down to the sessions – a late 70s Rogers XP-8 with Bosphorus hihat and
Brady jarrah wood snare.
Snares especially were carefully tuned to range from deep and loose to tight and ringy with lots of overtones. Drum heads were
chosen in order to complement each individual instrument, while various types of damping were used when appropriate. The
resulting library offers a very wide and varied selection of sounds, great for all kinds of music.
Recording path
All sounds were recorded through the Neve’s AIR Montserrat preamps
into Pro Tools, via Prism ADA-8 XR converters, at 24-bit resolution
with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz.
No EQ, compression or other processing was used on any channels.
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