Natural selection
Being able to select the right drum sounds for your mix is an important skill for any producer. If you pick inappropriate drums you’ll probably end up spending a great deal of time tweaking and processing them in order to get them sounding right – and even then, they won’t sound as good as if you had chosen appropriate sounds from the off. So how do you know which sounds are going to work in a given project?
Naturally, experience plays a huge part in this – the more projects you work on, the more you’ll begin to understand the characteristics you need to look for in a kick or snare sample. A big part of this is developing a finely honed appreciation for the genre of music you’re making. A common mistake made by novices is to simply listen out for the most aggressive, heaviest-sounding kick or snare, and go with it. While these types of sounds might be perfect for a high-octane dance track, they’d be difficult to fit into a deep house or liquid DnB mixdown.
In this tutorial, we’ve deliberately chosen sounds that aren’t particularly aggressive or characterful but rather are solid and clean. This is because these kinds of sounds are far easier to work with than sounds that have already been pushed to the limit. For example, it’s much easier to add character to a solid-sounding kick by layering it with, say, a ride cymbal, than it is to tone down the character of a kick that’s been processed to within an inch of its life already. By selecting sounds that are easy to work with, we give ourselves maximum scope for customisation and experimentation, and thus more chance of creating an effective, satisfying mix.
With thousands of sample packs already available, and dozens more released each month, it can be hard to know which to spend your hard-earned cash on. We suggest listening to demos of as wide a variety of packs as possible, and, of course, checking out the latest soundware reviews in every issue of this magazine.