Your Only As Good As Your Drum Sounds

No matter what kind of beats your making your going to need some hard hitting in your face drum sounds. There are a lot of ways to beef up your drum sounds especially when your in a million dollar studio paying some engineer a hundred dollars an hour to mix your track. Until that day you'll need to come up with some cheaper and more creative solutions to your problem. Building your own custom drum kits. Every producer has their own signature drum sound. This signature sound comes from many hours of sound searching and programming. Building your own library of sounds, and samples, drum sounds or otherwise is essential. You can get your sounds from any place, records, CDs, sample libraries or even record your own with microphones and real drums. Keep in mind that the source of your drum sounds will color their sound. When you sample a drum sound from a CD it will sound crisp and pretty clean. Drum samples from records will usually sound about the same as the record looks. If the record looks all scratched up and grungy, you can be sure that's how any thing you pull of the record will sound. Depending on the format of your sampler system you may want to sample your sounds directly into your sampler or record them into a computer to edit first. Both the Korg Triton and Akai MPC 2000 can read pc .wav files. Editing and tweaking your drum sounds on a seventeen inch monitor is much easier then on a small two color LED screen. If you record your samples into the computer you can also take advantage of the endless amounts of fx processing, eq and compression. I strongly suggest that you try Cool Edit by Syntrillium systems. (Now called Adobe Audiotion) After you have equalized some bass into your kick drums , over compressed you snare drums and ran your hi hats through a high pass filter plugin in the computer. Map your kit out. Mapping out your samples allows you to play them or use then in a song as you would any other instrument. Mapping out samples on a Akai MPC or another drum machine based sampler is slightly different then mapping samples on a keyboard. The manual for your sampler is the best play to look about more information on this. In many samplers you can also tweak your sounds a great deal in this stage. The Akai MPC series samplers allow you to place high and low pass filters on each individual sample. The most important thing however is to program your kits in a similar way. By doing this it will be easier to try out different sounds with your sequence later. This will also allow you to work a lot faster. Its easier to find your sounds if you always put them in the same place. ( Note : This works with car keys and wallets also ) Whether your using an AKAI MPC series drum machine and sampler, an old EMU sampler, or the latest greatest sampling workstation build a massive library of your own sounds for it. Floppy disks are cheap and drum sounds do not take up that much space at all. In the meantime you can buy Step Ya Game Up Vol. 1 which has 500 drum sounds cut, cleaned and ready to go. Each Cd-rom contains all 500 indusrty ready drum samples in Apple Loops (Aiff), Battery, EXS, Soundfont and Wav format. The EXS, Battery and Soundversion are already ampped out and ready to make hitz. This CD is also much cheaper then most of the other CD-Roms and Kits availble on the net. Peace Jazdout Producer Engineer Beats, Production, Drum Sounds and Engineering Services Step Ya Game Up Vol.. 1 Now On Sale $19.99