Choosing Your Next Drum Samples
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.
Most professional hip hop producers agree that any song is only as good as the weakest ingredient. While this goes for anything in music and literature, it stands to back up our statements here. Good drum samples can make any song better, while a bad selection or bad sequencing can drag the best song down into the doom of mid-chart locations. Even styles like Jazz require creative and excellent drums to back up the harmonies.
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!
Coherence in drum samples can be achieved through a number of different ways. Let’s see what we can do after sequencing. A common effect or reverb is one way to ‘bind’ the drum samples, and one of the most popular ways to achieve the effect is using a compressor. A lot of beat makers generally use this on a few drum samples at a time, such as the kick and snare sounds.
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.
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