Sometimes we find a great sample that we really want to use but unfortunately there is a click at the beginning or end of the sound. For this tutorial I am going to be using Audacity which is free to use and can be downloaded from the Audacity Website for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. You should be able to use any similar software to do the same technique.

Here is a simple kick drum sound and if you listen carefully you will hear a click at the end once the sample has finished.



If we was to put this into a drum beat we would get unwanted clicks all over our drum pattern. If we look at our sound in Audacity we can see that the reason this click is heard is because the last section of our sample ends while the sound waveform is either above or below 0.

We can solve this very easily by highlighting the last few milliseconds of the sound and going to Effect > Fade Out which will make the waveform fade down to 0 and eliminates the sudden stop which was causing the click. If the click is at the start of a sample we can instead highlight the first few milliseconds and choose Effect > Fade In and this will achieve the same thing but at the start.

Here is our new click-less drum sample using this technique.