Are You Sick of Cycling Through Drum Samples?

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?

One of the best ways to get organized is actually to sort through and organize the different drum samples to your liking. Sometimes this can be extremely difficult if the manufacturer of the software has locked down the sound library (or sound database). Extracting drum sounds from these files can be a nightmare, and this is true with the Propellerheads Reason music production system; Reason utilizes ‘refills’ which are files that are locked, the only program having access to them being the actual Reason program. In these cases, it can help to simply make your own kits from within the program or remember the locations of good samples.

If you have successfully saved all the drum samples you can and have access to the rest, you can try to take up this organization system. Name all of your drum samples with descriptive names but also place them into folders that describes just the sound type. So for instance, the hi-hats would all go into a folder named ‘hi-hats.’ Do this with all of them!

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.

This will ensure that you are never left high and dry when looking for genre-specific drum samples. If you’re making a rap beat and need a great snare with vinyl noise on top of it, you would go into your Rap Drum Samples folder and look through the Snares folder. You would probably only need to audition a few samples before finding the one that you want. You will have more time to actually make music.

Stopping here would be a shame, though. Your creativity could go a long way to making a unique system that works perfectly for you. Maybe you’ll systemize it in a way that shaves thirty to forty percent off your beat making startup time? You can also organize sounds other than drum samples. If you had string patches – a lot of them – and didn’t like the way your virtual instrument organized them, you could pack them in much the same fashion. And if you had sounds that could work for multiple things, you’d make hybrid folders, like Soul-RnB-Rap for a bell sound that would work well for soul, rnb and rap music.

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