Need electronic samples

[GarretGraves]

Need elec samples/software including percussion. Im willing to spend money so im not looking for freeware. Could use a step in the right direction. Cheap is ok but not looking for the cheapest. Thanks!

[big giant circles]

That's a very broad question.

[GarretGraves]

yeah im sorry. something for electronic music. i dont know what im lookin for which is why im here.

something along the lines of drum and bass. maybe even hip hop percussion. stuff like that. andwhatever sounsd would fit those genre's.

[Nase]

Both DnB and Hip Hop usually feature sampled drumkits quite prominently, actually. Electronic drums to me are strictly synthesized stuff, like 808/909.

The samples of a normal drumkit can very well be tweaked to sound right in an electronic mix, a lot of it boils down to the way it's sequenced and the right sound processing.

For pure WAV, I like Goldbaby: http://www.goldbaby.co.nz/products.html

MPC60 Vol II is sampled from breaks on vinyl, while the XRB samplepack features synthesized drums and some other gadgets as well. XRB is a pretty good alrounder I'd say.

But if you ask me, it's not absolutely necessary to shell out money for electronic drums. For synthesized stuff, there are good freebies like the VST Drumatic, and for samplebased, there are loads of breakbeat and one shot collections around. If you browsed through Dogsonacid.com a bit, I'm sure you'd find something to your liking.

You just need the knowledge of making the dry samples sound huge in your mix. I suppose if you bought a monster like Stylus RMX, you could skip on that for a while because it already sounds great out of the box, but it's good knowledge to have, and doing the fx part yourself will make you pay more attention to how you really want to sound, ultimately. The danger of killer VSTs is, they can really kill the tinkerer in you because they sound so awesome already.

Well if you just want easy phat drums, forget what I just said and get RMX now. (Just to clarify, it's great for shaping the sound to your liking as well, of course.)

[GarretGraves]

The samples of a normal drumkit can very well be tweaked to sound right in an electronic mix, a lot of it boils down to the way it's sequenced and the right sound processing.

are there any tutorials on how to do this?

[Yoozer]

For libraries, http://www.loopmasters.com offers a lot of material that's cheap and directly downloadable. http://resonantvibes.com/ has useful packages too.

In modern tracks you usually no longer have the 808 or 909 snare drum, but an acoustic snaredrum that's been processed. Processing includes a chain of effects; distortion, compression, equalization.

Processing may also include layering; if you use an EQ to remove all the high frequencies of a traditional TR-909 snare and layer it with an acoustic snaredrum where the lower frequencies are removed, you can get a completely new sound.

For drum and bass, what helps is to take a classic breakbeat (like the

) and to chop it in parts. The waveform is shown here: http://earz-mag.com/em/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/amen-break-wavelength.jpg

As you can see there are several "peaks" where the drum hits. Essentially, you could consider it as a bunch of isosceles triangles on their sides. You put a marker at the base of the triangle. The "end" of the sound is defined by the triangle's tip.

The trick is to replace the instruments with something else. You could do this by simply silencing the original and replacing it with another kick drum, or you could attempt to map the "groove" - the placement of each triangle's base in time - to a step sequencer. This doesn't always work as intended.

For instance, a drum and bass loop can be defined on a 16-step sequencer as follows:

      01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
kick  x                             x
snare             x                       x
hihat x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x

However, if you do it like this, it sounds very static. The original groove doesn't exactly divide everything in 16 steps for the hihats; the pair of steps (1 and 2) are closer together, with 1 starting at the right position, but 2 starting earlier, which gives you a "chickah" effect instead of a "chick chick" (two distinct hihat samples).

The original breakbeat generally sounds good because all drum sounds "bleed" into eachother. This makes it sound like a whole, instead of separate tracks and separate samples that don't all come from the same drum kit.

A drum kit is recorded by putting separate microphones - sometimes 2! - per drum. However, when you hit the snare drum, the hihat and kick drum mics are so close by that they just can't help picking up that hihat sound. Furthermore, the room reverberates, while electronic drum sounds are very "dry" since there's no reverb in an electronic circuit.

The holy grail is to create a realistic sound with samples. This means that you should try to avoid tight quantizing (by not constricting the samples to 16 steps), add variation (a drum is never played the same, twice), add groove (by varying volume and slightly varying timing), add bleeding (ambient effects) and use good samples (several recordings per drum sound even though they are at the same volume).

For (tribal) house, the cheapest trick in the book is simply to record a fragment of Brazilian samba from a world music radio station, the drum-heavy kind you hear at their carnivals - and to remove the low frequencies while layering it over purely electronic percussion. This adds groove to the electronic percussion while retaining the force in the kick and snare, and it's been used countless of times - and still works!

Youtube's got some great tutorials on drum and bass percussion. You'll find that a lot of people omit the fact that they spend hours in processing the kick and snare with effects.

[Hy Bound]

Yoozer has the correct idea. Just put a ton of effects and stuff on the kick and snare and then get into the habit of layering that with another loop and then another. Mainly, most good electric drum samples come from a highly affected drumkit.

That being said, StormDrum 1 and 2 have some awesome drumkits and at least SD 1 has a pretty decent electronic drumset and effects.

[Harmony]

are there any tutorials on how to do this?

Youtube's got some great tutorials on drum and bass percussion. You'll find that a lot of people omit the fact that they spend hours in processing the kick and snare with effects.

I've been watching a lot of the Computer Music Producer Master Classes lately (at work, don't tell my boss), and while some of them are kind of wonky, they're all still pretty interesting and you can always learn something by watching others work.

This one from Mistabishi is one of my favourites. He goes into detail about creating and shaping his DnB drums, especially the snare. It's amazing to see how much work these guys put into what most people would assume is just a simple sample.

It's a 4 part video so get some popcorn and enjoy. (A bulk of the snare stuff is on part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_yquqj3Qg

Brookes Brothers is another good one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU6k2gePXVc