Samples on samples

Most DAWs come with a sampled drum kit, but they often sound horrible... I'll be talking about layering samples to get a better sounding drum kit. Firstly lets begin with your drum sample. Most samples will be kind of low volume and low fidelity, so what you're going to want to do is get the transients you want to be louder. I've touched on one way to do this with my other blog about distortion, but you can achieve a bigger better brighter sound by layering different drum samples.

Here, let me show you. If we start with this drum sample, which is Logic 9 Studio Tight kit drum, as you can see this is not a bad drum sound, but it's kind of dull. What I want is a bit more oomph in the low end, so I'm going to play another drum sound along with it, do not pan these sounds differently or do anything differently. This is Logic's African drum kit, it has a nice ring in the low end that I'm wanting in this sample.

What we get is a combination of the two, and the creation of an almost completely new sound. The levels of the two are exactly the same. But there's still something missing, the snare is still a bit dull and I want to introduce some higher frequencies to it. I've found a snare that's been bit-crushed and possibly even distorted. This will be perfect.

I've layered the snare in with less volume than the others because I don't want it being too loud. It's a fine line between subtle enough and too much. But the drum is now something completely different than before, it has unique tones and characteristics that give it some emphasis. These samples can be loaded into a sampler like EXS24 and used in a variety of different songs. Most hip hop bands will either make their own samples or use a sample kit that someone who's far greater at making samples than them has made. Professional kits like the ones found on http://www.theproducerschoice.com or similar sites are all examples of layered drums. References: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/layers-complexity