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Get that Vulfpeck vintage drum sound

First of all, if you have never heard of Vulfpeck, it’s time to get your groove education up to date and check them out on Youtube, Spotify or Bandcamp. Go check it out now, this article can wait!

For all of you still around and all of you who returned to read on: “I know!! WTF right?”… it’s truly insane. That said, let’s go and try to become better musicians ourselves by playing along to some of their songs (A great trick about using their stems coming up) and let’s try and bring in some modern sample technology to sneakily emulate their authentic vintage vibe. I almost feel guilty about trying to do this, but hey, it’s the 21st century and computers can very realisticly fake some serious vintage vibes and it’s timwe we all just accept that. Let’s go!

Shortcut

The shortcut to the Vulfpeck sound is the Vulf compressor plugin. Buy it and slap it on stuff in your mix and you’ll get some instant vinyl vibes! I wasn’t aware of this little gadget when I made this video, so I actually approached the whole thing from a different angle. If you’re interested, read on!

Step 1: Download the stems

Over on vulfstems.bandcamp.com you can download the stems (speparate tracks for each instrument) to al lot of Vulfpeck’s songs. In the video above I’m working with the song “Dean town” so at leats make sure you get that one. It’s on a ‘pay what you like’ basis but please please give them some money and don’t be cheapass!

Step 2: Load the stems into your DAW

It might be nice to solo all the track one by one, listen to what everybody plays and then at some point solo the drum track and listen closely to how they sound. That’s what we have to recreate! Sidenote: You’ll hear the bleed of other instruments in the drum mics. This song was probably recorded with everybody in the same room and therefore the drum mics picked up the other instruments.

Step 3: Get those digital vintage vibes in

You’ll need XLN audio’s Addictive drums 2 and their “Vintage Dry” kit.

Step 4: Turn down the hi hat

The vintage dry kit has this preset called “Puncho Rosso” which is the very first preset. All you have to do is turn down the hihat (and turn up the volume of the drum track until it’s just as loud as the original drums).

Enjoy! (If you’re not a perfectionist)

The modified Puncho Rosso preset should be more than enough to get you jamming with the other instruments. If you want you can check out this lesson about playing a disco groove for some inspiration on what to do.

Get my tailor made preset to get an even better matching sound

I make custom drum presets in Addictive Drums for all my $3 Patrons on Patreon and to everyone who’s a Premium member. Premium membership is obviously more expensive than $3 but in return you will also get access to all the premium courses on this website, making it a pretty sweet deal!