Music producers today are frustrated – more so than ever – with trying to locate useable drum samples. In fact, we have more than ever – drum libraries that come with programs are really coming in numbers. Some programs, like Reason, come with thousands of drum samples, and it can be very hard to go through so many to find some samples that go with a current project. What is there to do for the fed-up beat maker?
The solution in this case is to organize the drum samples to the best of our ability. Sometimes this can be an extremely difficult task, but why? The reason is because some manufacturers make it near-impossible to extract the actual sounds from their databases. This makes it that much harder to converge and organize the bulk of the available sounds. Sometimes the next best thing to do is to get very familiar with the default patches (multiple sounds pre-selected by the sound designers) and keep a cheat-sheet of the genre-specific ones that appeal to you.
If it is possible to extract and save the drum samples from every collection you have access to, you may want to group them into folders that describe the actual sound type. For instance, all the kicks could go into a folder named, you guess it, ‘kicks.’ Snares would go into ‘snares’ and so on.
The next level of this sorting system is to make parent folders to these ones. So, for instance, if you had the kick, snare and hi-hat drum samples folders visible, you can create a new folder for Rap or Dance (to illustrate my point), and move the dance-specific kicks into the kick folder within the Dance folder. Do the same for the snares, hats and other percussion.
Soon you will have folders that are specific to genres, and these will contain the different elements sorted into group folders. So if you want to make a Rap beat, head into the Rap Drum Samples folder, and then Dance samples in the Dance folder and so on. This will ensure that your creativity does not die down in the mundane task of finding some sounds to keep the energy flowing.
You don’t just have to stop here, though. Your creativity is the best thing. If you can systemize it, you will be well off. You can also even apply this to instrument files and other sounds. Imagine if you had everything organized correctly and in genre folders. How much easier of a time would you have trying to pick samples up? I bet you’d find it a lot faster, that’s for sure! When you have two sounds or drum samples, you could also create hybrid folders. So if you had a string patch that could work for country music as well as RnB, you would name a folder Rnb-Country, for instance.
There’s more to a beat than rap drum samples. If you want to make hip hop beats, there is music theory and arrangement to be learned. Do you have what it takes to be a music producer?
