sampled drum kits......

How many of yall build your drum kits from sampling? do you usually build kits off one record or a number of records, and how do you go about finding difficult sounds like hihats that often have sounds on top of them?

also.....

feel free to discuss the importance of building your own kits

Look from drum breaks in records and chop them up. I build my kits from multiple records. Use filtering and envelopes to tweak the sounds.

TFunk13 wrote:Look from drum breaks in records and chop them up. I build my kits from multiple records. Use filtering and envelopes to tweak the sounds.

are drum breaks common on records?

Yes. You can find a drum break almost anywhere... but especially on 60s/70s soul, funk, and disco. Check out www.allthebreaks.com. You can order a cd full of breaks for you to chop up, or you can look at their list of records and try to find them.

Check out Aerosmith - Walk This Way or Led Zepplin - When the Levy Breaks

if you find and chop a break up and use only hits from that break then half the work is done for you in matching the sounds (the most important part of beat writing) and this is essentially very similar to using a matched kit of a sample cd....

its what you do with the drums after that that is important as most people share the majority of their breaks (not literally- but law of averages= unlimited break users divided by limited number of breaks).

In fact usually having each hit isolated gives you far more scope than having to extract single drum hits from a beat where you may need to filter things out to be left with the drum hit you want- which canthen sound unnatural when played back with unfiltered drums from the same break..

greg

I take the individual kicks and snares and hats from records, not necesarily off the same record but if the record got one of each I take them all and save them, even if I don't use them in the same kit.

I use a lot of wellknown breaks mostly from funk and rock.
I chop the breaks to single sounds hihat - snare - kick and tweak them with filter, EQ, compress... to sound my own.
One break gives me sometimes dozens of drumkits.

Ok well when I chop up breaks I usually end up with a kick, a snare, and a hihat. How many sound do you guys usually have in your kits?

i go for two of each. to give varition.