Pro tips for building your own unique sample packs

Cultivate your own unique-sounding productions by compiling bespoke sample collections

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Set aside dedicated sound design sessions away from creative writing sessions. This will keep you focused on the task at hand, and you’ll stock up your arsenal with plenty of ammo to fuel your compositions. To begin, create a bespoke sound design template project in your DAW , complete with send/ return effects, your favourite instruments/ effects, ready-to-go routing and more.

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Stay focused by setting yourself strict sound design targets. Allocate an hour or two in the studio and aim to create an arbitrary number of sounds – 10 pad patches, 15 layered kick drums, or 20 analogue bass loops. To demonstrate, we’ve automated Serum’s first macro to sweep up over eight bars, so we can easily craft FX sweeps one after the other – watch our accompanying tutorial video.

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When designing synth sounds from scratch, the last thing you want to have to do is refer to a manual every five minutes. So it helps to be a master of one synthesizer, rather than spreading your skills too thinly over several. This way, you’ll discover all of your chosen instrument’s features, greatly broadening your scope for sonic exploration.

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Compile entire track ‘packs’ for your sampler of choice. Imagine you’re designing an off-the-shelf preset bank, that you can load up and build a track with at a moment’s notice – complete with effects, performance macro controls and buss processing. We’ve built this 13-part pack in Live’s Drum Rack, containing all the parts required for a simple track.

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You’ll also need to pile on choice processing effects to really customise sounds to your taste. Dialling in processors from the ground up can take time, so it helps to have your own stacks of effects chains ready to go. Here, we’re calling up our own bespoke groups of treatments via Soundtoys’ EffectRack, which we’ve saved from previous sessions.

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Do you have stacks of unfinished 8-bar loops and unfinished DAW projects on your hard drive? Aside from dedicated sound design missions, sift through those abandoned follies in the hunt for fresh source sounds: recycle parts from old projects, bounce out individual sounds to a new folder, store away synth patches and save chord progressions and riffs as MIDI files for later use.