Using drum samples

[celerysux]

I was wondering when using drum samples what do you do to make the sample vary instead of just copying and pasting it throughout the track.

[harness]

chop it up. rearrange.

[lovenara]

load them in battery ,you can do lot of variations

[Whalez]

You really can do just about anything man.

A lot of samplers obviously have built in filters and enevelopes and stuff, then you've got FX, there are probably millions of possibilities.

Sometimes I use different ADSR envelope settings on the same drum sound just to give it a variation in the groove, but you can do the same thing by not locking everything tight to the grid and nudging things forward and back here and there to really get the whole beat moving and not boring sounding. You just gotta feel the beat cause if you go too far its gona sound out of rhythm it all just depends.

You can even do it without any FX or anything, like if you're making a standard 4 bar 4/4 housish beat, on the second snare of the third bar layer it with a different sounding one than all the others or something kind of like that.

I'm kinda learning too that u have to think of your melodies in the same way you think of the beat not as totally different worlds. So just by changing how the rhythm of the melody hits in comparison to the drums it can make the drums rhythm sound different and vice versa. It's like the whole track is one living thing you have to have all the organs and veins and muscles and stuff working together to be as good as possible and the really important part is how they all work off each other just like in our bodies.

Also sometimes like instead of hats I'll use a shaker or something and instead of putting it every other hit I'll put them all the way across the bar and just take the velocity on every other one way down so it still hits but just barely almost makes it sound like the usual every other hit hat type thing.

There are so many things you can do its crazy no way they could all be listed and I prolly don't even know that many only been making music for a couple months so I'm sure there are millions I don't know.

[kdgh]

layer multiple samples over eachother.

take 3 different kicks, eq them differently. 1 for the notch, 1 for the attack/plock, other for the bottom. Compress and tweak 'em a bit and you got your own drum sample out of samples

[atma]

chop your drums from breaks—then you'll have several variations of the individual sounds.

[celerysux]

Thanks for all the advice.

I've always wanted to use battery ,but for some reason when i load in the sample and play it it's plays lower than if the sample where just in my workstation (logic pro 9 ). In turn i have to raise the output and that usually causes it to distort. It helps playing the kick drum myself through battery 3. Does anyone know a solution?

And as far as "chopping" goes are you referring to chopping the tail of the sample to make it various lengths?

[atma]

by default any sample you load in battery is set up to use velocity, so the sound will be louder or softer depending on how hard you hit the keys/pads on your midi controller. under the setup tab>velocity there's a 'fix' button that disables velocity, so the sound will always playback at max volume.

regarding chopping, no—breakbeats are sections of old soul/funk/jazz/etc., albums that have drum solos on them. chopping refers to various ways of slicing those drum solos into their individual sounds to use as you please. basic sampling technique. the benefit in your case is that (especially with longer drum solos) you can extract a large number of snare drums or kicks that all have slight organic variations. so when you're sequencing your own tracks, you don't have to use the exact same snare sample every time, even though they're from the same actual drum. you can even set it up in battery so that the same note played in your sequencer will randomly trigger a different snare variation each time from a group of them that you load—it's sometimes referred to as "round robin".

Originally Posted by celerysux

Thanks for all the advice.

I've always wanted to use battery ,but for some reason when i load in the sample and play it it's plays lower than if the sample where just in my workstation (logic pro 9 ). In turn i have to raise the output and that usually causes it to distort. It helps playing the kick drum myself through battery 3. Does anyone know a solution?

And as far as "chopping" goes are you referring to chopping the tail of the sample to make it various lengths?