Edit the SUCK Out of Your Drum Samples
I’ve seen a lot of drum samples. Sometimes, people giving them away or even selling them disregard some very simple things and wind up giving out completely useless samples. Here’s some tips to make sure your drums samples don’t suck it.
ZERO FREAKING CROSSING
What is ‘zero crossing?’ A zero crossing point is a sample in an audio file that is completely silent (-infinity decibels), or near enough. Always make sure your samples begin and end on a zero crossing point. If you don’t, there will be an excruciatingly annoying clicking sound whenever the sample plays. Edison has a handy declicking button that fades the selection in or out to silence.
ABRUPT ENDINGS SUCK
A good drum sample will have a nice, natural sounding reverb tail on the end. Even if it’s a pretty dry sound, a bit of a roomy fade at the end will sound nice. If you’re chopping one-shots out of a loop of some sort, reconstructing the tail of the drum will always make it sound better.
CHOP OFF UNNECESSARY SILENCE
Always delete any silence at the beginning of a sample so that it starts right before the first transient. Having a nice ambience at the end makes things sound good, but once the signal gets down to -70 or so decibels, chop the rest off. It’s just wasting space. It can be hard to tell where there’s silence when looking at the waveform. A spectrum view of the sample will show dead silence much easier.
CHOP OFF UNECESSARY SILENCE
44.1 khz 16 bit WAVs PLEASE
I’ll take your MP3s, I guess, but they look ugly, and I have more than enough hard drive space.
MP3s ARE UGLY
