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