These days, selecting drum samples is as much of an art form as just about anything else in the electronic music production game. The top hundred tracks on Billboard (pop, hip-hop and RnB) are nearly the exclusive domain of producers who know how to choose the right drums – the ones that complement their tracks fittingly.
It is a popular reverb: a piece of music is only as strong as its weakest part. This actually goes for any body of work, but it illustrates our examples perfectly. Your drum samples need to be as good as they can be, because any lackluster ingredients will result in a bad dish here. Drums are so important these days that they can make or break any song in pop and hip-hop, and even in styles like Jazz and Soul, coloring the sound space with creative drum placement is vital.
The first tip: Coherence. I know that in electronic music production, pretty much anything can go, correct? Yes, anything can happen and anything can be paired with something else, but achieving some coherence among your drum samples and even the sequencing can do wonders for the appeal of your tracks. Try to find something that you can put across all drums to group them together and achieve some congealed feeling.
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.
When it comes down to picking your next few drum samples, consider the aforementioned tips. Also, I highly advise you to expand your sound selection. Staying within the same hundred samples will soon show in your music. You’re going to start developing the same sort of beats and music. It goes well beyond the samples, so do your creative mind a favor and expand beyond your current situation.
Are you after the best hip hop drums on the net? Check out drum samples for all your music production and beat needs.
Comments on this entry are closed.