QUESTIONS ABOUT SAMPLE CDS

I like to make electronic music and I've been quite frustrated over the choice of sample libraries that are currently available for drum samples. I hate loops because... well they loop. They're not original and anyone can rip on your sound. I'm interested in beat programming with individual samples. I search exhaustively for quality drum samples but all the stuff I find on websites like www.soundsonline.com and www.bigfishaudio.com is utter crap and doesn't seem to reflect what's currently used by professional producers in electronic music. Most of these sample CD compilations feature awfuly amateurish/dated sounding samples that are certainly not indicative of today's successful/commercial/professional electronic music. My question is my fellow producers, is where the hell does one find the real bread and butter with which the people making professional electronic music produce beats? Do the professional producers trade around secret private discs or what? Does anybody have any tips or reccomendations?

If you are looking to program beats then good samples are very easy to find, much easier than trying to find a clean sampled break. Instruments like Battery 2 come with an extensive drum library, the samples of which are very clean and punchy. As long as you have clean, punchy one shot drum samples then you have a solid foundation for making some mental beats!

 

The secret with making modern beats is really in the processing that is done once the patterns have been laid down. Most Techno producers start with plain 909 kicks and various percussion that may sound pretty standard until they begin to use compression, eq, distortion etc. This is where the magic happens.

Modern Drum & Bass producers tend to layer programmed beats with old funk breaks, rock breaks etc that are chopped in Recycle, then use varying amounts of eq and compression until the break sounds the way they want. It involves considerable amounts of skill and experience to get good results man. Chances are mate, you use the same kind of drums that the big dogs do.

 

Try some of the production forums that are around and search for drum processing, layering breaks etc, etc.

 

"The Grid" on www.dogsonacid.com

It's an essential resource for modern Drum & Bass production but the methods can be applied to any genre.

 

Hope this helps bro.

I have exactly the same problem. I am more into trying to create house / modern pop style beats rather than drum and bass. But my problem is really to do with the original sample that I start from - all the sample cd’s I’ve ever purchased contain in the large part extremely ‘dated’ sounding hits.

 

I run samples through the redrum machine in Reason and then rewire into Logic to add effects. I find this an extremely quick and easy way of setting up a beat and finding out what rhythms are working or not. The effects added in Logic have given me some success in creating some professional sounding beats but I feel limited by the number of quality single hit samples I have. I am wondering whether I should abandon the redrum/reason method of writing drum parts in favour of another method which would provide some good samples to start with, although from the people I have spoken to this may require me to spend far more time on a less user friendly platform. Ideally I need to find some up to date sample drum hits for the genre I’m after rather than the 1990’s style offerings I seem to have picked so far...

if you want punchy beats then i highly recommend a jamox x-base09 drum machine. I suffered the same problem with not being able to get nice punchy beats, the jamox has some seriously fat sounds on it. also if you can afford it i also recommend the electron machine drum there absolutely wicked, loads of samples on board. I love digital for most things... but for drums its analogue all the way.

Spectrasonics RMX is worth your cheking out. It has good libraries, is amazingly editable and simple, and has terrific built-n FX.

 

www.spectrasonics.net

Spectrasonics RMX is worth your cheking out. It has good libraries, is amazingly editable and simple, and has terrific built-n FX.

 

www.spectrasonics.net

 

 

stylus rmx is really good, well worth the money

stylus rmx is the ultimate for modern high class punch

Any alternatives to the Stylus RMX? Would like to do some research...

Check this out.

http://www.modernbeats.com/

Single hit samples in exs & other formats. I use em for all styles of music.

prophon was right it all comes down to proccesing mostly thats how you get your "sound". and it's a long road to get to . the grid on dogs on acid is a really great place to get all kinds of samples and get really usefull tips.

I'm not into electronic but I got a some great soundin rock sample loop here - like a drummer sittin in yur space - don't think they do single hits though.

http://www.bandmateloops.com/bm2/index.php

 

Am lookin for single hits/ fills and grooves in the rock/pop genre - anyone any other recs?

most audio "professionals" just sample their hits from other records (from the dj mix-in/out where there is no harmonic/melodic info) to create their own sample library, AFAIK.. and then process to fit their needs as mentioned above..

 

seriously, listen to the top 10 records on some house or breaks or dnb or whatever dj chart and pay attention to how many common drum hits you hear between them all. perhaps the producers were using the same library, but more likely they probably all sampled records that had all sampled records which sampled the same record 5 years ago (which is why a lot of kickdrums in prog house for example are a bit noisey [which gives a nice "flavor" IMHO] and have a hihat in the sample).

 

to get a really nice kick drum try doing that - sample a kick you really like, and load it into OSC2 in ultrabeat, but tune it and turn the volume down juuuust a tad and use the OSC1 to beef it up a lot so in the end it sounds completely different, but at the same time has a similar sound.

Linplug RM IV (nothing to do with RMX, though!) is a great-sounding drum VST.

 

RR