Best Sample CD's?

Guys,

Just a quick one.

One of my sample drives recently went down the other day before I had time to back it up (stupid I know).

I've pretty much resigned myself to losing what was on there (mainly a bit of everything, i.e Kicks, Claps, Hats, few samples etc), its not such a huge problem as to be honest alot of it was weak anyway.

I was thinking about buying some sample CD's just the other day and now that my hand has been forced with the drive going down I wondered if anyone had any reccomendations?

Sort of music I aspire to make is club bangers and the people who's music I love the most is Timbaland, Scott Storch & Neptunes (at times).

Not to say I wanna copy or sound like any of them but just gives an idea of what samples would be more suited.

Money is not a real problem, just lookin for the cleanest, baddest most useful sample CD's you have come accross.

All the best,

Nathan

hit ebay.

i copped my sample cds on the bay. and they are ILL. loads of drums kits, samples and other sounds.

i have a neptunes kit, a kanye kit, a dre kit, and others. i bought em from different catz months ago.

im still looking for other kits as well. most of my sounds a eastcoast. i want westcoast sounds and ethnic (arabic, indian etc) kits as well.

Arabic, Indian, sounds good mate, difficult to find though arn't they!

I will check the bay out now and see whats about.

If anyone else has any reccomendations please holla!

Thanks, Nathan

there was an ethnic arabian kit someone posted about a month ago maybe.
I don't remember the title of the thread though. I downloaded it and it was goo dquality crystal clear samples

As a drum connoisseur, I feel it is my duty to tell you to AVOID all those trendy ass kits named after famous producers. The reasons are as follows. Almost all of those well-known producers are notoriously picky when it comes to their drums and hence they put a lot of time into crafting their own kits. In one interview, Chad from the Neptunes talked about how he and P. would allocate a whole day just for the purpose of sampling vinyl and chopping up drums to be used. There's that, and on the record they have also confessed to blatant usage of the Triton drum kits as well as the Ensoniq ASR stock drums. I have done my fair share of checking out those cheap ass E-bay kits and they straight up suck. They are either poorly ripped hits from one of their songs or they are just plain weak noises that the person threw together because it reminded them of something the neptunes would possibly use. But more than anything, they seem to be a cheap way to make a buck because young kids will jump on them solely based on the fact that they are entitled "Neptunes Drumz."

Do searches and read their interviews to see what a producer's particular M.O. is. Some of them spend more time than others but it's clearly obvious that they all are crafting their hits to a certain degree. Kanye admitted to using drums from his sound modules and even straight up jacking drums off of other people's tracks. Not that that is anything special but you can see that he is aggressively going after sounds that he wants to use and not just picking up some "Hot" brand name kit. If you listen closely to him and Storch's tracks, you can also tell that they are in essence creating their own drums with creative use & layering. The layered rim with a clap slightly dragging behind it has become a staple and those two were without a doubt influential in bringing that aggravated clap noise out into the mainstream a bit.

Timbo is a beast when it comes to his drums. As opposed to the neptunes relatively consistent palette of drums, his approach seems to vary a lot more. It's safe to say that he relies heavily on all sorts of sample CDs. Sh*t like ethnic sample CDs and god knows what else. His early indian sounding tracks (like Get UR Freak on, etc.) are a dead giveaway. If he wasn't using sample CDs then he had a live tabla player but I highly doubt that was the case. Anyhow, the point is that he too has taken a proactive approach to the percussive elements in his music.

So what does this boil down to? Neptunes, Storch, Timbo...all these cats are putting in work for their drums in their own right. If you wish to get a banging ass sound like them, I would highly recommend avoiding copying their sounds but rather try to understand the approaches they used that led up to their end result.

As far as actual drum sources to hit up, here are some suggestions:

Triton Drums
Motif Drums
909 & 808 kits
E-mu module kits
Stock kits from ANY piece of hardware

As far as sample CDs go, here are a few for reference:

Dance Mega Drums 1 & 2
(These contain virtually all old school drum machine kits used over the last 20 years. Stuff like old school korg and linn drums, etc. Some of the noises can be a bit dated but for any serious drum fiend its worth checking out)

Emagic Extreme Hip Hop sample CD
(A decent selection of heavy hitting snares and kicks)

Native Instruments Battery 2
(I am referring to the samples that come with the program, not the program itselt. This is a dope ass selection of quality drums and ethnic percussion. A must have)

And of course the countless other sample CDs that exist. Traditional African, Indian, Chinese, whatever. There is way too much sick shit out there that is waiting to be used. The sky is the limit.

I forgot to mention this, but the mere act of sampling the drums from one module and having them pitched up and down in a sampler works wonders too. Trying to make drums bang on a Motif versus sampling those exact same drum kits into an MPC. It'll yield totally different results. Which provides some insight as to why Neptunes might have sampled the Triton factory drums into their Asr-10.

at any rate, I wish you Godspeed on your path to finding banging drums!!!

******Don't throw away that drive********

1. get a freezer zip lock bag.

2. put the drive into the bag.

3. put the bag with the drive in the back of your freezer.

4. leave it in there for 3 days and remove it.

5. re-install the drive

doesn't work everytime but it is worth a shot

I like the Native Instruments sample discs for use in battery. They are wav files so they work in your MPC as well. They are top notch.

Great advice guys, Beat God, as bizarre as your suggestion sounds I am in full belief that there is method to your madness lol, and am gonna give it a try tomorrow to see if I can salvage a few of the better samples from the drive.

Skylarkskank, if I am honest I don't think that I have read a more informative and well written first post by anyone on any forum.
Its inspired me to just do a shed load of digging to see what I can find, although time consuming, I guess the motto is that life is never easy and you have gotta work to achieve. These samples arn't gonna fall into my lap so I gotta go find them.

I forgot to mention that I do have a Roland V-Synth XT (since June 05) but have hardly used to due to only just completing my setup, so this should provide a decent platform to mangle some sounds.

I will start loading some stuff into Soundforge and see where I get, but are there any stock sounds / kits that I should be looking for in order to give my created sounds more impact.

I.e, 808 kick is used alot at the moment by people to give their drums a bit more umph. Are there and essential kits that most producers have that I should be looking for, just simple, clean stock sounds?

Many thanks to the others for the advice so far,

All the best and Happy New Year (about 4 hours away)

Cheers, Nathan

skylarkskank wrote:As a drum connoisseur, I feel it is my duty to tell you to AVOID all those trendy ass kits named after famous producers. The reasons are as follows. Almost all of those well-known producers are notoriously picky when it comes to their drums and hence they put a lot of time into crafting their own kits. In one interview, Chad from the Neptunes talked about how he and P. would allocate a whole day just for the purpose of sampling vinyl and chopping up drums to be used. There's that, and on the record they have also confessed to blatant usage of the Triton drum kits as well as the Ensoniq ASR stock drums. I have done my fair share of checking out those cheap ass E-bay kits and they straight up suck. They are either poorly ripped hits from one of their songs or they are just plain weak noises that the person threw together because it reminded them of something the neptunes would possibly use. But more than anything, they seem to be a cheap way to make a buck because young kids will jump on them solely based on the fact that they are entitled "Neptunes Drumz."

Do searches and read their interviews to see what a producer's particular M.O. is. Some of them spend more time than others but it's clearly obvious that they all are crafting their hits to a certain degree. Kanye admitted to using drums from his sound modules and even straight up jacking drums off of other people's tracks. Not that that is anything special but you can see that he is aggressively going after sounds that he wants to use and not just picking up some "Hot" brand name kit. If you listen closely to him and Storch's tracks, you can also tell that they are in essence creating their own drums with creative use & layering. The layered rim with a clap slightly dragging behind it has become a staple and those two were without a doubt influential in bringing that aggravated clap noise out into the mainstream a bit.

Timbo is a beast when it comes to his drums. As opposed to the neptunes relatively consistent palette of drums, his approach seems to vary a lot more. It's safe to say that he relies heavily on all sorts of sample CDs. Sh*t like ethnic sample CDs and god knows what else. His early indian sounding tracks (like Get UR Freak on, etc.) are a dead giveaway. If he wasn't using sample CDs then he had a live tabla player but I highly doubt that was the case. Anyhow, the point is that he too has taken a proactive approach to the percussive elements in his music.

So what does this boil down to? Neptunes, Storch, Timbo...all these cats are putting in work for their drums in their own right. If you wish to get a banging ass sound like them, I would highly recommend avoiding copying their sounds but rather try to understand the approaches they used that led up to their end result.

As far as actual drum sources to hit up, here are some suggestions:

Triton Drums
Motif Drums
909 & 808 kits
E-mu module kits
Stock kits from ANY piece of hardware

As far as sample CDs go, here are a few for reference:

Dance Mega Drums 1 & 2
(These contain virtually all old school drum machine kits used over the last 20 years. Stuff like old school korg and linn drums, etc. Some of the noises can be a bit dated but for any serious drum fiend its worth checking out)

Emagic Extreme Hip Hop sample CD
(A decent selection of heavy hitting snares and kicks)

Native Instruments Battery 2
(I am referring to the samples that come with the program, not the program itselt. This is a dope ass selection of quality drums and ethnic percussion. A must have)

And of course the countless other sample CDs that exist. Traditional African, Indian, Chinese, whatever. There is way too much sick **** out there that is waiting to be used. The sky is the limit.

I forgot to mention this, but the mere act of sampling the drums from one module and having them pitched up and down in a sampler works wonders too. Trying to make drums bang on a Motif versus sampling those exact same drum kits into an MPC. It'll yield totally different results. Which provides some insight as to why Neptunes might have sampled the Triton factory drums into their Asr-10.

at any rate, I wish you Godspeed on your path to finding banging drums!!!

this gets my vote for "best 1st post award". welcome to the boards, keep the knowledge flowin homme.

I copped "dance megadrums" from ebay the other day and this sht is ill!!
(I mainly use the 909/808 and emu drums though)

pad-ophiliac wrote:

skylarkskank wrote:As a drum connoisseur, I feel it is my duty to tell you to AVOID all those trendy ass kits named after famous producers. The reasons are as follows. Almost all of those well-known producers are notoriously picky when it comes to their drums and hence they put a lot of time into crafting their own kits. In one interview, Chad from the Neptunes talked about how he and P. would allocate a whole day just for the purpose of sampling vinyl and chopping up drums to be used. There's that, and on the record they have also confessed to blatant usage of the Triton drum kits as well as the Ensoniq ASR stock drums. I have done my fair share of checking out those cheap ass E-bay kits and they straight up suck. They are either poorly ripped hits from one of their songs or they are just plain weak noises that the person threw together because it reminded them of something the neptunes would possibly use. But more than anything, they seem to be a cheap way to make a buck because young kids will jump on them solely based on the fact that they are entitled "Neptunes Drumz."

Do searches and read their interviews to see what a producer's particular M.O. is. Some of them spend more time than others but it's clearly obvious that they all are crafting their hits to a certain degree. Kanye admitted to using drums from his sound modules and even straight up jacking drums off of other people's tracks. Not that that is anything special but you can see that he is aggressively going after sounds that he wants to use and not just picking up some "Hot" brand name kit. If you listen closely to him and Storch's tracks, you can also tell that they are in essence creating their own drums with creative use & layering. The layered rim with a clap slightly dragging behind it has become a staple and those two were without a doubt influential in bringing that aggravated clap noise out into the mainstream a bit.

Timbo is a beast when it comes to his drums. As opposed to the neptunes relatively consistent palette of drums, his approach seems to vary a lot more. It's safe to say that he relies heavily on all sorts of sample CDs. Sh*t like ethnic sample CDs and god knows what else. His early indian sounding tracks (like Get UR Freak on, etc.) are a dead giveaway. If he wasn't using sample CDs then he had a live tabla player but I highly doubt that was the case. Anyhow, the point is that he too has taken a proactive approach to the percussive elements in his music.

So what does this boil down to? Neptunes, Storch, Timbo...all these cats are putting in work for their drums in their own right. If you wish to get a banging ass sound like them, I would highly recommend avoiding copying their sounds but rather try to understand the approaches they used that led up to their end result.

As far as actual drum sources to hit up, here are some suggestions:

Triton Drums
Motif Drums
909 & 808 kits
E-mu module kits
Stock kits from ANY piece of hardware

As far as sample CDs go, here are a few for reference:

Dance Mega Drums 1 & 2
(These contain virtually all old school drum machine kits used over the last 20 years. Stuff like old school korg and linn drums, etc. Some of the noises can be a bit dated but for any serious drum fiend its worth checking out)

Emagic Extreme Hip Hop sample CD
(A decent selection of heavy hitting snares and kicks)

Native Instruments Battery 2
(I am referring to the samples that come with the program, not the program itselt. This is a dope ass selection of quality drums and ethnic percussion. A must have)

And of course the countless other sample CDs that exist. Traditional African, Indian, Chinese, whatever. There is way too much sick **** out there that is waiting to be used. The sky is the limit.

I forgot to mention this, but the mere act of sampling the drums from one module and having them pitched up and down in a sampler works wonders too. Trying to make drums bang on a Motif versus sampling those exact same drum kits into an MPC. It'll yield totally different results. Which provides some insight as to why Neptunes might have sampled the Triton factory drums into their Asr-10.

at any rate, I wish you Godspeed on your path to finding banging drums!!!

this gets my vote for "best 1st post award". welcome to the boards, keep the knowledge flowin homme.

co sign that sh*t, welcome abord yo

theres a guy on ebay, he sells alch kits premo kanye etc, there actually ill kits


to be safe tonight, i have a 400 GB external HD, but im gonna burn everything to cd just incase