Invite veteran drummers Jeremy Stacey and Jason Cooper to your next production Your drum tracks are only as good as the drummer behind the kit. The London Grooves instrument collection for SampleTank brings you two of the best: Jason Cooper, drummer for The Cure and David Bowie; and Jeremy Stacey, who has recorded for hundreds of artists like King Crimson, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Ryan Adams, Roger Daltrey, Sheryl Crow, Tom Jones, etc.
Created by multiple GRAMMY award winning engineer/producer Cameron Craig and made in collaboration with Filippo Gaetani of Ray Recordings, London Grooves offers more than 1500 high-quality WAV files, 1200 ready-to-mix drum stems, and 300 stereo grooves, all recorded in legendary London studios The Pool and Narcissus Studios. It represents the ultimate resource for producers and musicians who are looking to incorporate the iconic London drum sound in their productions, and covers a massive range of rock, pop and indie styles.
The collection includes finely recorded drum grooves with unsurpassed authenticity and character that will elevate the level of your productions.
Different from the many anonymous-sounding drum loop collections, we dove deep into the creation process of this library to give you nothing less than the most genuine performances.
Every beat, every stroke, down to every single ghost note, embodies the unique playing abilities of these drummers: two different stories and approaches to music which intrinsically flow in the DNA of these loops.
The recording phase. The nitty gritty of London Grooves. Drums are a challenging instrument to record. If you aim for the best results possible, there are no shortcuts to be taken. You need great players, exceptional rooms, skilled engineers and a selection of the right equipment.
Jeremy Stacey's recording sessions took place at The Pool, one of the most iconic facilities in London.
The Pool's beating heart is an ultra-rare EMT console surrounded by some of the most coveted analog equipment by Altec, API, Urei, Tube-Tech, Chandler, Neve, and ADL.
The studio has two astonishing live rooms, each with its distinctive sound signature.
The main live room is large and spacious, with a "warehouse feel" that makes drums sound surprisingly well controlled.
For the session, Jeremy used his Tama Star Maple drums in a 22” 12" 13” and 16” configuration, a Tama Starphonic snare, a Vintage Slingerland snare and his one-of-a-kind White Rogers snare and Istanbul Agop cymbals.
Microphones included Neumann FET47s, an AKG D30 on the kick drum, Neumann U87s on toms and STC4038’s as overheads, fed into classic Neve 10 series pre/EQs.
Jason Cooper recorded in the live room of Narcissus Studios in Willesden, London, where he brought his extensive collection of drums for the occasion. Starting with a Brady kit in Jarrahwood and a Ludwig 14x6” Black Beauty as the basis, the configuration included different kick drums and snare drum models and sizes from Noble and Cooley, Yamaha, and a selection of Zildjian cymbals to best suit the attitude of the recorded beats.
For the drum sound, a mix of vintage and modern microphones were used along with various Neve 1064 pre/EQ modules, with UA 610, Analogue Addicts or Sontronic Sonora II preamps called into action on occasion. To create pristine sounding loops but with grit, drums were processed using vintage compressors like Gates and Urei's as well as Sansamp units for a bit of distortion and attitude.
Now take all these ingredients, give them to veteran producer and mixer Cameron Craig and listen. It goes without saying that the London Grooves library brings together all their recording and producing expertise, putting it at your service.
Drums unlimited Thanks to the flexibility and power of SampleTank's engine you can explore countless creative possibilities but with a unified approach to treating an instrument like a drum kit, which by nature is typically recorded using multiple microphones.
We came up with the idea of treating loops just like the parts of a real drum kit, with its multi-mic setup, and we eventually ended up with stems, where multiple audio loops of Kick, Snare, Toms and Room Mics run simultaneously.
Stems come as separate SampleTank Elements, allowing individual editing of synth-like parameters like pitch, filter, envelopes, and LFOs for a highly creative outcome, whereas SampleTank Macros let you dynamically adjust the level of each stem independently as you would do on a real analog mixing console.
This collection also comes with stereo mixdown versions of SampleTank Instruments. In addition, 44.1kHz/24-Bit WAV files are also available, for immediate drag and drop into your session.
Highlights
- 6 GB of content
- Over 1500 samples
- Over 1500 WAV audio files
- 70 loop instruments
