Snappy Snare and Kick Drum Samples

If you’re new to music production and beat making, you may be wondering about all the fuss regarding snare and kick drum samples being ‘snappy.’ Why would we place so much emphasis on this sound characteristic of drums when the arrangement and other aspects of a song seem to be much more important? Well, the fact is that it’s a hugely important topic of debate. There is such an importance placed on the snappiness of your drum track that it’s paramount to suicide to ignore the techniques to make things cut through a mix.

Making your drums snap and pop isn’t as hard as some others may lead you to believe. It’s simply a matter of using compression that is well-adjusted to the type of samples you’ve chosen, and also is accented via other samples that you may choose to boost the effectiveness of the snare and kicks. EQ can also be used to emphasize the frequencies in which the instruments really keep their punchy bits. This can be found out via a spectrum analyzer quite easily. A wave editor can also help to gauge the volume-time dynamic.

Both software and hardware effects usually have factory patches that display the capabilities of the effects unit. This is very useful for the budding audio engineer and drum samples editor; feed the device some standard samples – but first analyze the samples and really listen to them – then start applying some of the default effects, not the parameter levels and starting doing A/B tests on the sound; that is, before and after the effect. If you can start to internalize the changes and link the sound alteration to the settings, you will be well off!

Compressing your drum samples to add snap is a very common road taken by mixers and music producers alike. Sometimes it can be a bit hard working out what the knobs and dials actually do, so writing down – in your own words – what the changes do to the drum samples, will help you out a lot when making critical decisions later on. Try out different software and hardware compressors, as they also sound a little bit different and you will have trouble with some, while others will be easy to work for you.

So, by now you probably understand that really writing stuff down can give you a huge advantage. When describing the effects that a compressor has on drum samples, you want to make several observations, including the sound sample that you were working on (describe its sound), the supposed effect of a particular parameter (as the manual suggests) and also the actual, perceived sound (how you hear it). Describe it in plain English for maximum comprehension later on when comparing different experiments.

Now as a final tip, I’d like to mention how important it is to have good drum samples. Not just good ones, but a solid selection to pick from. The less samples you have, the more time you’re going to be twisting knobs and adjusting sliders, and therefore the less time you will have making an actual beat! So if you want to be able to easily convert the music in your head and lay it down into your program or workstation, expand your selection of sounds.

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