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?
A great way to get around this issue and start to ease your musical suffering is to organize the drum samples into folders and rename the files so they make sense. Name them for musical functions or for what genre they would be best for. Once you have done this with all of your available drum samples, you could have a very nice collection to keep referring to. Sometimes it\’s hard to get samples out of a program like Reason because it locks its sound databases, and in these cases it can be beneficial to make patches from within the program to use for future projects within the same application.
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!
To take this organization to the next level, you would want to nest these folders in other folders. What should you name the higher-level folders, then? Be creative. Some people would prefer to name the folders with the genre names and then include all genre-specific files therein. So for kick sounds that pertain to the dance genre, you would move them to a folder named \’kicks\’ and have that folder in a folder labeled \’dance.\’
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.
There\’s more to a beat than rap drum samples. If you want to make hip hop beats, there is music theory and arrangement to be learned. Do you have what it takes to be a music producer?
