Dan's House Vintage Drums

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 we heard live in the studio the day we recorded them.

We've got drums from 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. We used vintage Neve 1272 preamps and an Apogee PSX 100 analog-to-digital converter in the signal chain, so the GOG files are true-to-life samples of these great-sounding, hard-to-find drums.

Although these drums are collector's items, they don't spend their lives on the shelf — they're actively used at gigs and in the studio. Each snare is represented with a total of 138 samples, covering a wide range of sounds: tight and muted to open and ringy, whisper quiet to hard rim shots, crossticks to brushes.

No processing was used on the samples — no EQ, reverb, compression or gating. Each drum was recorded with a close dynamic mic, a large-diaphragm condenser a few feet out, and a stereo pair 8 feet from the drum and 10 feet apart; the close mics were phase-corrected and the stereo pair left with its natural 3 ms delay for a slight ambience.