| Are You Sick of Cycling Through Drum Samples? |
| Articles - Lifestyle |
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In this modern day and age, we've got so many distractions when it comes to making music, it can be so hard to actually just sit down and start making some beats or work on a mixing project. When it comes to drum samples, we've all got thousands sitting on our hard drive, but how many can we use right now? We have a project open and are looking for a nice clap sound that is not over the top and not synthetic. How hard is it? What can we do?
In this modern day and age, we've got so many distractions when it comes to making music, it can be so hard to actually just sit down and start making some beats or work on a mixing project. When it comes to drum samples, we've all got thousands sitting on our hard drive, but how many can we use right now? We have a project open and are looking for a nice clap sound that is not over the top and not synthetic. How hard is it? What can we do? One of the best ways to get organized is actually to sort through and organize the different drum samples to your liking. Sometimes this can be extremely difficult if the manufacturer of the software has locked down the sound library (or sound database). Extracting drum sounds from these files can be a nightmare, and this is true with the Propellerheads Reason music production system; Reason utilizes 'refills' which are files that are locked, the only program having access to them being the actual Reason program. In these cases, it can help to simply make your own kits from within the program or remember the locations of good samples. If it is possible to extract and save the drum samples from every collection you have access to, you may want to group them into folders that describe the actual sound type. For instance, all the kicks could go into a folder named, you guess it, 'kicks.' Snares would go into 'snares' and so on. To take this organization to the next level, you would want to nest these folders in other folders. What should you name the higher-level folders, then? Be creative. Some people would prefer to name the folders with the genre names and then include all genre-specific files therein. So for kick sounds that pertain to the dance genre, you would move them to a folder named 'kicks' and have that folder in a folder labeled 'dance.' This will ensure that you are never left high and dry when looking for genre-specific drum samples. If you're making a rap beat and need a great snare with vinyl noise on top of it, you would go into your Rap Drum Samples folder and look through the Snares folder. You would probably only need to audition a few samples before finding the one that you want. You will have more time to actually make music. You don't just have to stop here, though. Your creativity is the best thing. If you can systemize it, you will be well off. You can also even apply this to instrument files and other sounds. Imagine if you had everything organized correctly and in genre folders. How much easier of a time would you have trying to pick samples up? I bet you'd find it a lot faster, that's for sure! When you have two sounds or drum samples, you could also create hybrid folders. So if you had a string patch that could work for country music as well as RnB, you would name a folder Rnb-Country, for instance. DISCLAIMER: This article is provided as information only and is not to be taken as financial advice. If you're a beat maker and want the best-quality free drum samples to use, go here: drum samples. |