Jeff Lynne Drum samples

Ok - I know this has been debated many times in relation to his production styles and yes you either love it or you don't. I happen to love it but appreciate some people don't.

I really want to create the JL drum sound for my own recordings. I'm almost done setting up my home studio and have BFD2, Kontakt and Jamstix 3 as drum software. But wherever I've looked, none of the sounds come anywhere near close to his, even with the use of compression etc. I'm a guitarist mainly and don't the tools or time to create the sounds from scratch in a studio so I really would like there to be a library of Jeff Lynne drum samples to use on my own recordings.

Does anyone know if this has ever been tried? After all, there are a lot of artist sample packs being created these days. I'm thinking Free as a Bird onwards - Julianna Raye and his soon to be released Long Wave and Mr Blue Sky albums. The drums are fabulous (in my opinion )

Thanks for listening..

Tim

 

Didn't he double track the snare hits?

 

Hi. Thanks for the reply. I'm sure that's one of things he does. He did in his ELO days. But I'm sure there's a lot more to it. They sound so different to anything else I've ever heard.

 

Apparently he did a couple different things to get his drum sound.

One was to double-track Bev playing the kit. So Bev had to write out some of his parts even so they matched up. They apparently would not double the kick though. Anyway there is information online about it somewhere in an interview with Mack Reinhold I believe.

Also during the Wilbury period when he came up with his snare thing. He would actually record a drum machine snare played through a speaker with a real snare drum sitting on top of it upside down and then record that. You can find more info about that online as well.

I recently tried this myself and it was pretty awesome. I didn't get the exact sound Lynne did but it was really effective as far as a home studio goes. It sounds like a real snare but it is far more consistent sounding than I could achieve by recording a snare being played by a real person in my basement. I'm going to play around with doing this to the kick and toms through real toms too just to see what that sounds like. That will probably be too messy and not tight enough to use. But experimentation is half the fun!

 

ampmods...many thanks. I read that somewhere about the upside down snare thing (I think there was a picture illustrating the set up which was funny). I don't have a set of drums myself but when I get round to it I'll experiment with 'stacking' sounds I guess. I think I'm still going to look for samples. In fact, I'm surprised no-one has come up with a Jeff Lynne sample pack as yet.

 

PS - Ampmod - If the article re: upside down snare was actually from people associated from the Wilbury sessions, could you let me know where to find it please? The one I'm refering to is on GearSlutz..

 

I remember reading he usually records one drum at a time on a separate track and then edits the drum part together later on the multitrack machine.

By the way, it's Phil Jones playing the drums on the Julianna Raye album, Tom Petty's "Full Moon Fever" and Del Shannon's "Rock On". In the Wilburys, he worked with Jim Keltner.
Jeff's own drumming always seems rather average to me when compared to Jim's but that's not really surprising since Jim is the "world's favorite drummer" after all.

 

I once read that Jeff recorded a snare drum by using two microphones; one hung high over the drum kit while the other was placed at the back of the room (I believe this was early in the making of Secret Mesages at Wisseloord Studios around October 1982, possibly even for Who's That? or Grieg's Piano Concerto In A Minor, which both started off as soundchecks later finished during the Zoom period). During the same sessions, he also augmented Bev's live drums with the Oberheim DMX plus a Linn LM-1, though I don't think the latter is actually credited in the liner notes even though its distinctive clap sample can be heard prominently on a few songs, including Bluebird and the outtake/b-side Buildings Have Eyes.

 

I actually much prefer the more laid back drum sound on Highway Companion verses the sound you here in everything else that he has done in the last 15 years, probably because Tom Petty played the drums on that album as opposed to Jeff.

I'm a huge fan, but he really needs to hire a session drummer and try some different recording techniques.

 

Thanks for all the facts and behind the scenes stuff . Where do you know all this stuff from??

Does anyone know if there are samples around that have been recorded in the Jeff Lynne way?

 

I'm not sure about there being any drums that were recorded like Jeff's style, but I guess you could always sample the opening snare crack directly from Free As A Bird...

 

Hi ShardEnder

(from eloforever?)

I have actually done that strangely enough. That snare has a tom with it too (I think). And I'm guessing it would involve copyright for me to use it?

 

I can't remember where. But yeah... the gearslutz site was one of the places I read about it.

And yeah... Jeff likes to capture room sounds for the snare as well. And then you can play around with gating and whatnot.

Also, like it was said, starting in the late 80s at least, he liked to record toms and also cymbals separately which is why they stand out so much without any bleed from other drums. It's a weird approach and some people hate it. I think it's a really cool way to go about it... however Jeff (or Jim Keltner) tended to do the same sort of tom fills and cymbal hits on everything and that kind of became redundant. It wasn't that the sound was bad imho... it's just the execution became a bit too rote which sort of wore out the novelty too fast.