Fxpansion BFD2 Manual User Manual download pdf (Page 11)

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 pro-

ducer 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 play-

ers.

Kit preparation and tuning

During the sessions, the primary objective was to capture the instruments as organically and powerfully as possible, while cover-

ing 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’ Vis-

talite 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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Fxpansion BFD2 Manual User Manual Page 11

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