| Pick Your Next Drum Samples - Tips |
| Written by John Gellei |
| Wednesday, 16 December 2009 08:17 |
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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.
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. It is a popular reverb: a piece of music is only as strong as its weakest part. This actually goes for any body of work, but it illustrates our examples perfectly. Your drum samples need to be as good as they can be, because any lackluster ingredients will result in a bad dish here. Drums are so important these days that they can make or break any song in pop and hip-hop, and even in styles like Jazz and Soul, coloring the sound space with creative drum placement is vital. The first tip concerns coherence. In electronic production of music, there is kind of an anything-goes mentality among even some of the more respected beat makers. You would do well, though, to find some ways to set your drum samples with common glue, something that binds them together beyond the sequencer they were placed in. Achieving this binding feeling will instill a group-dynamic into the track as a whole! Let's take a look at some coherence-inducing techniques you can use today. In fact, you can do this right now to an existing drum track. The first way is to use reverb on all drum tracks at the same time. Use the same amount of reverb, or different amounts to add some dimension to the drum track. Compression is another form of binding you can put into action right now. Try it on the kick and snare drum samples to start with. 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. Okay, so what next? What do you do when picking your next hip hop drum samples? Consider the tips I've outlined here for picking and sequencing your drums effectively, but also make sure that you have the necessary tools. What do I mean? Well, consider your drum library. If it's so small that you start to use the same samples over and over, it's probably time to start looking at acquiring more drum samples sooner rather than later. About the Author: Want to find out a lot more about drum samples? Then visit the web's number one hip hop drum sounds website for your fix. |