Folk Rock Drops Volume 1

Folk Rock Drops vol. 1 contains 16 drum tracks taking influence from a range of folk rock tracks. Most of them are based on songs from the 60s and 70s. The drums were played by Folk Rock expert Martyn Barker and recorded by legendary Producer / Engineer Phill Brown. The album was recorded at the historic Miloco Livingston Studios in London using a 1966 Vintage Ludwig Hollywood Kit.

The grooves on these tracks take reference from artists such as John Martyn, Traffic, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Bob Dylan. Ranging in tempo from 74 BPM to 162 BPM there is a huge range of tracks and grooves to choose from. There are a few 3/4 options and a couple of tracks were played with brushes and hotrods.

For the sound Phill Brown (John Martyn, Bob Marley, Rolling Stones, Talk Talk, Led Zeppelin) used his years of accumulated knowledge and went back to the time of the 60s when he was based at Olympic Studios. Phill’s idea was to create a 1960s drum sound with a modern twist. Instead of positioning the microphones close to the kit he wanted to capture a natural drum sound and record the ‘dead’ room. He used only five microphones on the kit: one on the kick, the snare, two kit microphones placed around the kit which provide a surprisingly good stereo picture, and a mono overhead. All of the mics were recorded through API mic pre’s and recorded straight to 2” tape on a Studer A80 with a 16 track headblock before being transferred into Pro Tools. The kit was recorded in the drier sounding room at Livingston (we saved the liver room for Volume 2 ). Although the sound is controlled it has a great ambience around it. Livingston has been used to record a multitude of hit records over the years and is well known for being one of London’s top drum rooms.

The kit we used for this was a beautiful vintage 1966 Ludwig Hollywood Kit. It is almost identical to the Super Classic kit which Ringo Starr once used, except it has two rack toms rather than just the one. These are beautiful sounding kits. The snares used were a Ludwig 400 and a 1960s wooden Ludwig Snare.

Martyn Barker has had a career playing the drums professionally for over 30 years. He started his career with the band Shriekback and is a busy session drummer recording and touring. Martyn has played for artists such as Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Richard Hawley, Katherine Williams, Lou Reed, Peggy Seeger and he also played drums on Joe Boyd’s ‘Way To Blue’ making him a perfect choice for this album.

All sixteen tracks can be purchased as multi- tracks (unmixed), stems (mixed) or drum loop packs. The multi-tracks come with a tempo map and OMF file to export into other DAW. We provide templates for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Reason, Reaper, Studio One and Ableton Live and the audio comes as 24 Bit WAVs. We also include multi-track loop packs separated into intro, chorus, bridge, verse and outdo. These loops have been locked to the tempo so you can quickly build tracks rather than using the tempo map.

The stems and mix packs contain all the drum parts and percussion as separate stems, come as 24 bit WAVs and also include a tempo map. The stem packs also include stem and mix loops chopped into the same song parts as the multi-tracks (intro, chorus, bridge, verse, middle 8 and outro). These can be quickly imported into any DAW to build tracks without a tempo map.

The loop packs contain live 4 bar loops in each component stem and a folder of grooves and fills which are 2 bar loops locked to the beat. We have included as many useful loops that we can get from each drum track. The loops come formatted as 24 bit WAVs, Apple Loops (24 bit and 16 bit) and Rex 2 Files.