The vibe and sound of an historical recording at your fingertips

The Black Album Drums is a drum library for BFD3 and Kontakt 5.5 (full version) inspired by the drum sound featured on the "Black Album" by Metallica from 1991:

We approached the production of this library with an enormous amount of respect and love for the sound we wanted to capture: one of the signature sounds of the history of Rock and Metal music. To this extent, we were lucky to track down a large number of information and material regarding the sessions we were inspired by.

Please Enjoy these videos and audio demos describing the features of the library and further info on the recording sessions and see you in a bit, below here.

Audio

Enjoy these audio demos: each demo is also presented in a Drums++++ version with the rest of the arrangement mixed very low so you can better enjoy the sound of the library.

All demos feature the drums purposely mixed inside the hosting plugin (Kontakt 5.5 on Grinders By Little Dom and Your Time Has Come, BFD 3 on Black Drive and Too Bad To Be Forgiven), hence using only the stock effects available on each supported platform.

The only processes applied to the drum sound after it exits the hosting instrument are: a brickwall limiter on the master (Fabfilter Pro-L) and the mp3 encoding.

Re-creative drumming

After finding out the former One On One Studio, famous in the 80s and early 90s for some of the best rock records of the times, got back in business under the name of 17 Hertz in the same exact location and with the room sound perfectly preserved, we decided we wanted to produce a drum library there.

Out of luck we also found out that Ross (the Drum Doctor) still owns the kit which was originally used on the "Black Album". The next step was finding out Mike Tacci, originally the assistant engineer of that record, was available for the session.

The studio

Located in North Hollywood, One On One Recording studio gained popularity in the 80s for having the best drum sound in Los Angeles and became home to many of world top acts: Alice in Chains, Aretha Franklin, Bad English, Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, Earth, Wind & Fire, Etta James, Hal David, KISS, Lita Ford, Megadeth, Metallica, Michael Jackson, Michael McDonald, Mötley Crüe, Sammy Hagar, Survivor, The Temptations and Tom Petty are among the legends who recorder and/or mixed at One On One Recording along the years. During the 90s the studio was bought by a Japanese rock star and became a private facility. The studio ended up in a dire status until Jason Gluz, the new owner under the 17 Hertz Studio moniker, got it and restored it to its original glory.

The drums

The "Black Album" was tracked using a 1980 Gretsch drum kit Ross Garfield rented to Metallica during the long months they were resident at One On One starting autumn 1990. Featuring Lars' Zildjian cymbal set of that time and the famous Tama Bell Brass 6.5 inch snare drum.

The drums are in perfect shape (just a little bit of rust on the Bell Brass) and were equipped with matching drum heads, After the initial setup we spent quite a bit of time matching the tuning of the drums to the one on the record before we set off to sample the drums.

To the original kit setup we added a vintage 1970 Ludwig Black Beauty 6.5 inch snare and a ride cymbal to augment the expressive power allowed by the library.

The microphones (and outboard)

The original recording featured a quite amazing recording setup and mics. The net is awash with myths regarding those sounds. The studio currently doesn't feature the same mic locker as the one the original production had at their disposal, so we had to rent quite a bit of material. Then we decided to add a bit of options based on our taste and ears, always to augment the possibilities given by the library

The engineer

None of this attention to detail would have been possible without the expertise and direct hands-on experience we gained by hiring Mike Tacci to engineer the sampling sessions.

Mike, a northern California native (and of proud Italian origins), has been a top notch recording engineer in the L.A. area for more than 25 years and has engineered for Metallica, Whitesnake, Impellitteri, Eros Ramazzotti, George Lynch, Vasco Rossi, Richard Marx, Megadeth, Michael McDonald, REO Speedwagon, Bad English, L.A. Guns and Steve Lukather among others.

Mike had a lot of first-hand memories and information regarding the original recording session and was crucial in helping us getting as close as feasible to our source of inspiration. Add to this a wonderful attitude and the ear of an expert engineer together with a deep knowledge of the room, since he used to be assistant engineer at One On One Recording for quite a few years early in his career.

In January 2016, we reunited with Mike at 17 Hertz to create a set of signature presets for BFD3 and Kontakt which will place his own take on this historical sound under your fingertips or drumsticks (update required).

The Black Album Drums - the Engines

We strived to capture the vibe and keep it along the tedious and long hours of editing required to turn any recording into a sample library of the highest quality.

The engines we chose to run our drum libraries are the best for what we feel are today's top usage scenarios.

Fxpansion's BFD3 gives you a dedicated engine, made, thought and tailored for drums from the ground up and with 13 years of history behind its back. The Black Album Drums integrates perfectly inside BFD3 and makes use of its DSP capabilities to bring you 13 presets which can be used for final mixes or as starting points for your own experimentations.

NI Kontakt, on the other hand, allows us to customize the user experience in different ways and presents the library in a format which is a standard for the composer/songwriter nowadays.

Sounds and Patterns Video

Kontakt - a custom engine

When we decided to support Kontakt we knew we needed to offer a custom interface for drums. Development took a bit under two years and now we are proudly shipping the first version.

The user interface is thought out to be easy and quick to learn and use while featuring the power-user tools some of us love to tweak when working with drums.

Hidden beauty

Behind the curtains of the engine allows us to:

Reverb, with class

The IR Reverb module in our engine currently features 36 unique proprietary impulse responses. These are originated from vintage plates, hardware and coveted real rooms, which, when used with drums, push the limits of what can be done with a single drum kit.

Ready-to-go

10 global mix-ready factory presets ease your way into using these drum kits, to which we add presets for each channel, including the reverb.

The Style Player in Kontakt

We developed a custom Style Player for the Kontakt version.

In depth info is available in the walkthrough video above, in short:

3 ways of interacting with the MIDI Player:

Modify each pattern in realtime (and modifications are kept when assigning to a MIDI Key or dragging to the DAW) at the global or atomic level in terms of:

Now includes Drum Singles - Black Album Edition - FREE!

A no frills User Interface with just two simple pages:

Eventually:

Some applications

Drum triggering:

Quality you can tell

We released the first multi-mic drum library in 2003, with Scarbee.

We know drums. We know drum-sampling.

We know how to turn a drum recording session into a set of coherent, greatly playable sampled instruments. Not just a collection of sounds. This effort needs a lot of love for drums, time, ear, knowledge, dedication and experience.

Our drum samples have been used on countless tracks in the last 13 years, counting on an ongoing success still sprawling from our first library, Imperial Drums, re-released in BFD format through FXpansion at the end of 2013, our ever-growing product line and the large large number of companies we worked with along the years: Native Instruments, Ableton, Steinberg, Arobas, Cakewalk and Presonus to name just a few.

DISCLAIMERS:
- this Instrument requires either BFD 3 from FXpansion or the FULL RETAIL VERSION OF KONTAKT 5.5.2 or higher, the free Kontakt Player will run this Instrument in demo mode ONLY for a few minutes.
- this Instrument may be acquired only in downloadable format, download size is about 12.5 Gigabytes for each format (separate downloads), so expect longer download times on slower connections

Features

BFD Expander Features

Kontakt Features