Anyone else have this problem with their drums?

So I'll find a sample, get it looping nice and all that, then pick out a kick, snare and hat that fit, and when I throw em on it sounds dope together, but when you mute the sample and it's just drums, they sound so mediocre. Have any of you made dope drum beats out of one shots before? Sometimes you just can't find that right break

Yeah I've made dope drums out of one shots before, thousands of times.

If you're accustomed to using breaks you have to focus on what makes the break work so well and apply similar tactics to what you're doing with one shots.

Most classic breaks are a human drummer who's got the funk. Most of that funk is from it not being "perfect" (as in on a hard quantized 1/16 or 1/32 grid). Kicks will almost always be right on the beat. But the snares and hats can be looser. Slight nudging of a snare a few ticks forward or backwards will change the whole fell of a drum loop. backwards can give a slightly rushed feeling that might sound good, but more often it a couple tick backwards that give looser feel and simulates a drummer leaving a little "air" around the snare beats.

At times I have the kicks on beat perfectly (always really), the snare either or on beat perfectly or slightly behind but no quantize on the hats and go by ear. A lot of times your MIDI grid will look crazy, but your ears wont lie. If it sounds good it sounds good.

If you're chopping breaks or catching singles off records...I get a lot of singles of intros...like jazz and reggae/dub records, maybe the first 3 seconds have 2-4 singles you can chop out...you can chop them with a little space at the front end. Real slight but enough that you could even be hard quantized and it still is loose due the little space and the slower attack of the sound when it triggers.

Also on chopping breaks you can usually find 2,4 even 8 variations on one snare. Even on some simple 5 and 13 snare boom bap I will alternate which one I use even reverse (the order of) the 5 and 13 ones depending. That only gives you some swing and variety before even actually using any actual swing setting.

On MPC's and lots of software you can put them on different pads or use a round robin feature to define how say 4 snares on one pad will alternate. How hard your velocity is, every press gets one of the four or even random.

Related to that I usually edit the velocities by hand. Again I just do what sounds good even the numbers or graphics if that applies look weird as hell. Just another quick method to humanize the whole loop and have that break styled funk present.

The cool thing about these easy methods is they can work for sampled chopped drums, libraries, sample of drum machines or whatever.

If you use software, Reason, Live, Cubase and Logic (and others) have groove extract features. With that you can take any loop in the world even on drum ones...extract the swing/timing of it, the "funk" in effect, and then apply that to loops and whole tracks. SO you can program hard quantized on a grid and still take your favorite break and take the swing of it and add it on to a whole new drum loop.

Reason and Live are the easiest and possibly the most fun to so that with.

There's many more ways to spice up drums, I didn't even mention re-sampling and compression and FX (a touch of reverb goes a long way as an example). Quick one though send all the drums to the same compressor to "glue" them together better...

But I'm sure you'll get more replies. Hope some of that above stuff gets the ball rolling.

Housemaster wrote:So I'll find a sample, get it looping nice and all that, then pick out a kick, snare and hat that fit, and when I throw em on it sounds dope together, but when you mute the sample and it's just drums, they sound so mediocre. Have any of you made dope drum beats out of one shots before? Sometimes you just can't find that right break

meta thats some good info.


I do this sometimes man, not saying my drum game is banging, but if i do what you mentioned above, and find the drums feel a bit stale, i'll mute the sample and edit my drums until they sound better. you have the basic pattern down, try play some stuff without the correction on, turn off full volume or start nudging things around until you get the feel you want, now un-mute. you prob wont notice a difference, but at least when the samples muted, your not bugging out on your drums now

In any drum-based genre you should be able to solo the drums and have them hitting all the right frequencies, with additional ambience and punch for that style. It's not as though every beat has to be BANGIN', but it's worth trying to produce a 'deconstructed break' from one shots if you can. There's so much more flexibility from using one shots over just a chopped break, especially when it comes to making the whole beat gel. Mixing the two obviously also works well.

Are you talking about working strictly in the MPC or in a DAW?

Loop based production is a hell of a thing when they're your own loops.

Yeah, sometimes. The beats that are album material always have drums that lock into the samples.

So if the drums are in the wrong key and they lack the dynamics the beat needs, it's not going to happen. It's good to listen to the original drums of the sample and find a matching pair.

i just keep "mix and matching" until i find the right drums. usually end up with 3-4+ drums layered before i actually finished the beat. im amazed sometimes at how just a simple one-shot kick layered with other kicks can totally changed the sound overall of the layered kick (dynamics, shape, etc.). not to mention, beefing up the sound.

for me personally, its good to have a huge library of sounds that i've saved over the years...as i've gone through most of them and grouped them, which makes it easier for me to pinpoint certain drums that i need before i lose the inspiration.

..but every loop in the in the world is just crying out to go under the knife and be sliced...

meta said most of what I would have suggested.


I always make my own drums, using this pack of like 1000 various drum sounds that I found online years ago. Mostly all of them are pretty weak, and require a lot of layering and effects (eq, reverb, compression, overdrive, etc). Sometimes I'll synthesize them myself.
I've even a couple times taken a drum sample into Audacity and manually tweaked the sample with the hand-draw tool. Mostly just on clean, synthesized kicks, since the waveform is pretty basic to start with.


I very often don't quantize; you get a more natural feel, and more practice at keeping a beat. If nothing else, I'll always have a few different versions of the same hats, and if I want more variety, multiple snares. Kicks I pretty much always have just one sample, mostly quantized. But even just varying velocity can make a big difference.

A random LFO can also be good for reducing a mechanical feel, just a subtle amount to level, pitch, or filter, with a LFO rate longer than the sample itself.

some thoughts.

Thanks for the advice dudes, gonna try without the quantize. That groove extract thing sounds dope too, but I'm just using Acid Pro and Komplete

It's not nearly as easy or intuitive as Reason, Live or even Cubase or Logic...but Acid Pro does have facilities for groove extraction, application and editing.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/gro ... acid_pro_7