How To? Learn anything step by step!

Why would you want to generate snappy kick and snare drum samples? Well, as we all know, there’s a serious loudness war going on, and what better way to drown out the competition that have the rhythm track in your songs simply cut through any speaker set or car radio and be instantly recognizable and catchy? With the importance placed upon drum samples and their arrangement and sound, budding music producers pay no attention to this topic at their peril!

Making your own drum samples ’snap’ is not very hard with a little practice. You can even use free tools, these days. Just search “free sound editor” on Google to see a list of results; Audacity is a great one! Using compression and equalization are great to begin with. If your work-flow already includes these, good on you – you have a head start now, so use it wisely. Besides using these effects, you can edit sound waves manually, and in this case you would be looking to alter the sound spikes, accentuating the initial attack manually for your drums.

Both software and hardware effects usually have factory patches that display the capabilities of the effects unit. This is very useful for the budding audio engineer and drum samples editor; feed the device some standard samples – but first analyze the samples and really listen to them – then start applying some of the default effects, not the parameter levels and starting doing A/B tests on the sound; that is, before and after the effect. If you can start to internalize the changes and link the sound alteration to the settings, you will be well off!

Compressing your drum samples to add snap is a very common road taken by mixers and music producers alike. Sometimes it can be a bit hard working out what the knobs and dials actually do, so writing down – in your own words – what the changes do to the drum samples, will help you out a lot when making critical decisions later on. Try out different software and hardware compressors, as they also sound a little bit different and you will have trouble with some, while others will be easy to work for you.

When you’re making notes on the settings you change, try to describe them in plain English – by that, I mean all the effects and the way they change the sound. If you can well and truly comprehend the way that a sound is effected by the different switches and level meters, you will be well-equipped to make real decisions in a studio environment. Keep a sheet that includes the different settings, supposed effects (according to the manual) and perceived effects (the stuff you hear).

As a last tip, you should always try to choose the correct drum samples to start with. If your library is big enough, you really won’t have that much of a problem, which is a good thing. The less you need to tweak and alter your current selection of samples, the more time you will have making the actual beat. It will be easier for you to translate the rhythm and sound in your into the sequencer and move on to the other instruments and such, so keep expanding your sounds.

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