(funky drum beats) – One of my favorite contemporary bands is the band Vulfpeck. They bursted onto the
scene a couple years ago with a blend of awesome, groovy, funky, retro, but modern stuff,
and from the moment I heard their first song, I was a fan. And in this video, we're gonna
talk about their drum sound, how we can recreate in our
home studios, but also, how you can become a better
musician by giving them $1.00. This is not $1.00, this is 5 Euro bill. Cause I'm from Amsterdam,
so, you know, symbolic. (energetic bass beats) ♪ The Quest for Groove. ♪ – So you all probably heard of this website called Bandcamp, right? It's this place where
bands upload their music and you can download their
stuff, and support them. And Vulfpeck also has a Bandcamp page where you can download all their music, but what many people don't
know, is that they also have a page called vulfstems.bandcamp.com. It's a separate page, and
on this page they put a few of their most popular songs, and you can download the
stems of those songs, and that means that you can
get every track separately.
So the guitar separately, the
drums separately, the piano, anything, vocals, separately. And that's, of course, very, very, awesome cause you can load all
those tracks into your DAW, for example and then
listen to each of them, like what does the bass do? Or how does the drum sound? Or you turn the drums off, and you grab your pad
controller, and you play along. And that's, of course,
and invaluable thing. It gives you this opportunity to play with these great musicians, I mean, I'm a huge fan of their
bass player, Joe Dart. I think he's a beast, and
I wish he was my friend. Anyways, yeah, sure, I wish he
was my friend, but you know, when you don't have friends,
you can download the stems, and you can pretend you have friends.
And that's the second best thing. (emotional techno music) Jokes aside, it's common knowledge that if you want to grow as a musician, playing together with musicians
who are better than you or are really good at their
craft is this awesome tool, so what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna fire up their song Dean Town on in my DAW,
because I obviously bought the stems from them. And we're gonna listen
to their drum sound, try and recreate it and we're
gonna jam along to the song. Lets see what we've got real quick by soloing all the tracks. So bass (bass music) Guitar. (guitar music) Keys. (piano music) And this last track is some
sort of synth with some claps. And that leaves us with the drum track. Let's solo that for a
moment and listen to what it sounds like. (drum music) – I spent the last hour trying to recreate this exact drum sound to
the best of my abilities and I'm gonna talk about
how I did this in a moment, but it might be nice
for all of you to know that I also saved everything
I did into a preset for addictive drums two that
I'll share with my patrons over on Patreon.
So here's a little snippet of what the end results sound like. (funky drum music) So yeah, that's pretty cool, right? So let me tell you how I got there. The first thing I
thought when listening to the original drums was vintage analog, and after that I thought 70s, right? And this is a great example
of why listening to a lot of different music from different
time periods is super helpful if you want to be flexible and
fast in your music production because if I had not spent some
time listening to 70s music I could not have possibly
made that connection.
But I did, I made the
connection and because I did I could immediately take a
shortcut because I knew that in my addictive drums two
library I had this kit called "Vintage Dry," subtitled,
"authentic 1970s studio drums." I mean, chances are that
this is exactly what we need so I fired that up and all I
had to do was turn down the hihat a little bit and I
immediately had a preset that worked for me. So here's a little sound
byte alternating between the Vulfpeck drums and the
drums that we've got so far. And note that I'm not playing
the exact same drum part, I usually create the right
sound first before I figure out what the exact drum part is.
That's what I did here as
well, so, here's the example. (funky drum music) First of all, if you want to
learn how to play the groove you just heard, you should
check out this video about learning how to play an easy
but awesome disco groove. That's more or less the
thing that I am playing here. Now, we can go on with the mixing, the sounds we just heard
don't sound exactly alike but in most cases I
would stop here anyways, because in 10 minutes I
got a sound that I liked, a sound that works in this recording, so for playing and
practicing this should be more than enough, but just
for the sake of the video I wanted to tweak the sound a
little bit and get even closer to the original.
This is where we basically get
into some serious drum mixing and it's beyond the scope
of this video to really get into the nitty-gritty details, but let me just summarize
what I did so you can at least understand the process of
how these things get done. First, I looped that
part we just listened to, going back and forth
between the Vulfpack drums and our drums and first I just
listened to the kick drum, then I just listened to the
snare, and then I just listened to the hihats and I tried
to determine what changed whenever the beat would
switch between my drums and the Vulfpack drums. What I noticed was this, one,
the Vulfpack kick drum had much more punch than mine, the
Vulfpack snare was snappier than mine, and the Vulfpack
hihats were panned differently and had a different sort of
top end hiss to them than mine.
So after I noticed that I
did the following things: I added trigger sound to the
kick drums so that every time I play a kick drum I would
trigger another punchy kick sound as well, which made my
whole kick sound punchier. I browsed through my library
of different snare drums and eventually picked a snare
drum from the blue oyster kit instead of using the snare
from the 70s vintage dry kit, so I just swapped out the snare and I panned the hihats
more to the center and I adjusted their EQ groove. Now that's basically how I ended up with my Vulfpack drum preset. Over here is another
interesting video about drumming with unconventional sounds. For example stuff that
you sample yourself and a method of determining which
pad should trigger what sound and over here is a video
laying out a trick to instantly improve your finger drumming speed. Very interesting stuff so
be sure to check them out, see you next time, bye.