Vintage Recording Techniques

BFD Expansion Packs General Discussion
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After a day of using this pack I’m loving the kit and mic options. The Jazz Festival snare is gorgeous and ringy and the whole kit feels lovely and raw.

My only gripe is the second rack tom lacks mid velocities making it noticeably quieter than the other toms (on my edrums) and it seems a bit short of velocity layers overall. I’ve compensated by tweaking the velocity curve which helps.

Also the snare rim shots are all very loud (struck hard) even at low velocities and again they seem to lack layers overall. Again, I will try tweaking to compensate.

I suppose it’s not going to get any updates at this late stage…

Anyway, please make more packs like this :slight_smile:

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I picked up VRT as well. Overall I like it a lot and it has tons of character. I went with the Ludwig 400 snare. Cuts really well and has nice overtones. I do have a couple of nit picks though…

The mid tom has a very bad, low freq resonance around 100Hz that was really hard to tame with eq and dampening.

The bell on the ride is very quiet and lacks definition. I bumped up the articulation trim and it helped to balance it out with the bow.

The splash cymbal sounds more like a larger crash imo.

None of the shells have an ambient send to the OH’s. Kind of strange, as most other expansions do. Not the end of the world, but I like to rebalance my OH’s to just use them for mostly cymbals. I only use the hihat and ride direct cymbal mics. A HPF helps to remove the low information in the OH’s.

Just about every BFD expansion has some little annoyances, but usually not enough to detract from the overall experience and sound. I probably used way more ambient mic channels than I should’ve for my drum mix, but balanced and processed judiciously, you can get a huge sound. Highly recommend this one.

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Interesting stuff. Thanks.

I’ve only briefly played through the presets so far (got a cold!) and those were the things which leapt out to me.

“None of the shells have an ambient send to the OH’s.”

I don’t have BFD open right now to check, but are you sure the ambient send is not scrolled out of view? There’s so many sends on this pack the GUI has a scroll bar!

I will have a poke about when I get back on mine later this evening…

I love the hugeness potential of this pack. It feels like you can push up the ambient mics without it getting too washy or woofy. It reminds me of some of my favourite Can (krautrock) drum sounds.

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I’m not talking about the ambient return channels on the mixer, but in the Tech panel. There you have on/off buttons and blue horizontal send volume sliders that feed the different amb channels. What’s available depends on which kit piece you have selected in the mixer. You’ll see that the OH feed is not present when you have a shell direct channel selected, but when you switch to any of the cymbals, it appears.

I was surprised with how many ambient channels I was able to use in a pleasing way and push the faders up pretty high, at least with no processing. However, once I pulled BFD3 into my DAW and routed there with the FX in my DAW, I had to pull down the ambient master fader a good 5dB or so because I put compression on a lot of those channels and it was bringing up a bit too much of the room sound. Then I just pushed back up the OH’s only a bit to get more cymbals. I also had to put a dynamic eq on the ambient master fader because the sum of all those channels was giving me too much buildup in the lows when the kick hit.

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Yeah, I think it’s getting hidden by the scroll bar! :upside_down_face:

The OH feed is bottom of the (enormous) list and it disappears from view when you are scrolled up to the top of the list. The scroll bar is a new feature for this pack because there are so many mic channels. I think you’ve just not spotted it yet.

I just strapped a limiter across the main outs and spent a happy half hour playing it live, bringing various channels up and down. It will need plenty of tweaks for e-drumming consistency (as we mentioned) but it’s got bags of character. I’m loving the 400 snare now too - they’re both great.

I had to lower the ride bow AND raise the bell to get a nice balance. The splash pitches up nicely for a more splashy sound. Can’t wait to dive deeper into mixing this thing.

I wonder where it was recorded… I wish there were tracking notes like with the Platinum packs. Maybe Drew will chime in…

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Ok, I will take another look.

I guess I could’ve lowered the bow, but I kept that neutral, raised the bell and lowered the edge. The edge artic sounds pretty good when riding 1/8th notes. You just need to use the swell feature.

I should’ve thought of that. I will try pitching the splash up.

Yeah, there’s no info on the studio used that I can see. Drew has talked a bit about VRT on this forum, but I didn’t find anything about the recording location. @CHASER usually knows this stuff.

Apparently, VRT, along with Crush may have a future update for the extra hihat articulations like Dark Farm.

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BFD Vintage Recording Techniques (2018)

BFD Vintage Recording Techniques was recorded and produced in-house by engineers Drew Vernon and Michael Bugh.

Ludwig Classic Maple drum kit

( sticks… wires on and off.)

Ludwig 22" x 14" Bass Drum
Ludwig 18" x 16" Floor Tom
Ludwig 16" x 16" Floor Tom
Ludwig 13" x 9" Rack Tom
Ludwig 12" x 8" Rack Tom
Ludwig 14" x 5" 400 Snare
Ludwig 14" x 5.5" Jazz Festival
Zildjian 14" Quick Beat Hi-Hats
Zildjian 12" K Splash
Zildjian 19" K China Boy
Zildjian 16" A Custom Crash
Zildjian 19" A Custom Crash
Zildjian 22" A Custom Ride

Drum Heads:
Remo coated Ambassadors.

Mic’s

29 microphone channels

(3) Mono Room Mics:
Mono 1 side kit: Oktava MK-220
Mono 2 far room: Oktava MK-220
Mono 3 front kit: Neumann U87 Fet

Direct Mics:
Kick in: AKG D112
Kick out: Shure Beta52
Snare dynamic: SM57
Snare condenser: SE3A
Snare bottom: SE3A
Toms: Sennheiser MD421
Hihat: Neumann KM 184
Cymbals: SE3A
Amb3: AKG C414s
Room: SE1A

5 vintage recording techniques with infinite mixing possibilities.

A technique that has been used on countless rock records, the spaced pair setup featured 2 AKG C414 XLS large diaphragm condensers, which created a wide stereo image exhibiting a huge palette of sonic colors.

Blumlein Technique used 2 ribbon microphones configured to give an excellent stereo image and a smooth sounding ambience.

Glyn Johns Technique, 2 Neumann TLM103’s were used for overheads, which when combined with the snare and kick direct channels provide that classic sound

ORTF Technique, 2 AKG C451B mics were used. This gave a wide stereo image with excellent mono detail that is perfect for jazz tracks.

Real drum bleed (Full bleed*****) and drum resonance between the shells.

*****Full bleed means that the sound of each drum is heard in the mic channel of every other drum. This is true for all kit pieces in VRT with the exception of the cymbals, which receive no bleed, but do bleed on to the other mic channels.
Bleed can be reduced in the KPI panel by reducing the Return or Send controls.

When mixing VRT with other BFD3 packs, please be aware that bleed will not be present.

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Thanks mate. Where is, “In House” exactly?

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The old FXpansion in-house studio, which was in South London and we made quite a few packs there.

Shells most definitely should have an OH send.

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Thanks for the info. Pics would be fun (but obviously not necessary!)

I’d pay for an update with more artics/ layers too :slight_smile:

FUN FACT. I lent you some drums for a (not quite) in-house recording back in the Shoreditch days. I forget the studio but it was just down the road from the old FX HQ. I seem to remember some of the BFD2 drums were there (although they were recorded at Air). Gareth was on the desk. In the end the desk had a noisy channel and the recording was scrapped. My drums never made it into BFD :frowning:

Seems like several lifetimes ago…

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Yes I was mistaken about the OH sends. I think because the window pane scrolling is a bit wonky in BFD3, so I wasn’t paying close attention that there were other mic sends hidden as well.

Thanks @MidiSauce for the tip. The splash indeed pitched up really well. There was a sweet spot, but I found it. I normally don’t mess with the pitch if I don’t have to. Sometimes I’ll detune the kick a touch to get a bit more bloom if I need it. In the case for the splash, the pitch function becomes a useful tool, so I should think about it more as such.

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The Strongrooms. Slightly before my time it sounds like, I joined in 2008. It really DOES feel like several lifetimes ago! When the world had light, hope, joy, promise, and all that other stuff.

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Yeah - Strongrooms - that name rings a bell… They sure were fun times (plus we were all young and naive). Hey, you could record a new pack through a minidisc player for that authentic noughties sound… BFD Shoreditch.