Wave Machine Labs Dan's House Vintage Drums Collection - Sample Library
The Dan's House Vintage Drums collection features 10 classic snare drums, 4 rack toms, 5 floor toms, and 6 bass drums. The samples were recorded with top-shelf gear and carefully mixed to give you all the detail and impact heard live in the studio. This virtual instrument collection can be used with the Drumagog Drum Replacer Plug-in also from Wave Machine Labs.

Drums used in this sample collection include Gretsch, Rogers, Slingerland, Radio King, Pearl, Yamaha, Leedy, Ludwig and Eames, dating from the '20s through the '80s, including a full 1967 Ludwig Club Date kit.

Vintage Neve 1272 preamps and an Apogee PSX 100 analog-to-digital converter were used in the recording signal chain, so the GOG files are true-to-life samples of these great-sounding, hard to find drums!

No processing was used on the samples - no eq, reverb, compression, or gating. What you hear is just the sound of the percussion instrument recorded with great gear, allowed to decay fully and naturally.

Although these virtual drums are collector's items, they don't spend their lives on the shelf. They're actively used at gigs and in the studio. (The '67 Ludwig kit was just used for tracking some of Paul Simon's stuff in 2003.) These are working instruments!

The Sample Process

Each drum sample was recorded with a dynamic mike at a distance of a few inches, a large diaphragm condenser mike at a distance of a few feet, and a pair of large diaphragm condenser mikes about 8' from the drum, and 10' apart to capture a stereo image. The two close-mike tracks were carefully phase-corrected, but the stereo track was left with a natural delay of about 3 ms to give a slight ambiance.

The three sources were then balanced and mixed down to create the stereo samples in the collection. No processing was added in the signal chain.
Each snare is represented with a total of 138 samples, covering a wide of range of sounds, from tight and muted to open and ringy, whisper quiet to hard rim shots, crossticks to brushes, and more.

The snares were recorded with a close mike (Shure Beta 56), a mike at about 3' above (Neumann TLM 193), and a stereo pair (Audio Technica AT4033) about 12' apart, and 10' from the drum.

The toms were recorded as the snares were, with a close mike (Shure Beta 56), a mike at about 3' above (Neumann TLM 193), and a stereo pair (AT 4033) about 12' apart, and 10' from the drum.

The bass drums were recorded with the close mike (an AKG D112) just barely inside a hole in the head (or an inch or two from those heads with no holes), a mike about 3' in front of the drum (Neumann TLM 193), and the stereo pair (AT 4033) on the drummer's side of the drum to catch the snap of the beater on the drum head.