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Home  Music Articles Choosing Your Next Drum Samples
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Choosing Your Next Drum Samples |
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Written by JohnGellei
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Saturday, 05 December 2009 |
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Top music producers often tell magazines and websites that picking out drum samples is just about an art form these days. This is at least partly true. Think about it, the top 40 (and even beyond) pop and hip hop tracks are dominated by producers who know how to choose drums that take their tracks to another level.
by JohnGellei
Top music producers often tell magazines and websites that picking out drum samples is just about an art form these days. This is at least partly true. Think about it, the top 40 (and even beyond) pop and hip hop tracks are dominated by producers who know how to choose drums that take their tracks to another level.
Most professional hip hop producers agree that any song is only as good as the weakest ingredient. While this goes for anything in music and literature, it stands to back up our statements here. Good drum samples can make any song better, while a bad selection or bad sequencing can drag the best song down into the doom of mid-chart locations. Even styles like Jazz require creative and excellent drums to back up the harmonies.
Tip 1: Coherence. This is kind of a problem for many amateurs to accept, mainly because electronic music is supposed to be all about choosing the different drum samples and sounds you want and then throwing them all into the same pot, right? Maybe, but any song - however experimental - should have some coherence among instrument groups; otherwise, the dissonance factor is perpetually increased.
When speaking about hip hop drum samples, coherence can be achieved any number of ways. The two tips I would give is to use a reverb effect (however subtle) on all drum tracks. This will give the impression that the samples were recorded or played in the same environment. You can also trial some common compression, and this would work well on the kick and snare drums, and less so on samples like the hi-hats and cymbals.
The second tip I'd like to discuss is the style factor. Why style? Style is not the type of drum samples you can choose to use in your drum machine, but rather the way you make space of the drums and also which effects you use. Expanding on the compression discussed earlier, you could also use filters and other effects like slight distortion to set your drums apart as a group of their own. This is the best way to induce style into your existing sounds. It's all about dynamics and the way you adjust your samples on the fly.
When it comes down to picking your next few drum samples, consider the aforementioned tips. Also, I highly advise you to expand your sound selection. Staying within the same hundred samples will soon show in your music. You're going to start developing the same sort of beats and music. It goes well beyond the samples, so do your creative mind a favor and expand beyond your current situation.
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