Rhythm Creation’s first samplepack and you should be able to create some nice percussion loops with these shaker scraper samples. There are 12 wav files in the zip file with no effects on, just unedited recorded samples recorded by me. Enjoy! and keep a look out for more samplepacks coming soon.

Download from RhythmCreation.com

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All my own made samples that I post are released under the Creative Commons NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0 Licence. (Free to use and change for non-commercial uses). For the full terms of this license click the image button below.

One thing that every electronic musician should have is a big collection of samples in which they can come to when composing and quickly select one needed or to experiment with, these are my tips on sound sample collecting which can help you expand your collection, keep organized and create some interesting results.

1. With samples one of the most important things to do is to stay legal and organized. A simple way to do this is to sort your samples into different folders on your hard drive by license type (for example folders called Royalty Free, Free To Use Non Commercially and Creative Commons Samples). Then within those folders put the samples into more folders entitled by the source you found them (for example a folder called The Freesound Project). Using this method you can easily see the license and source of sample when choosing.
2. Some days when you aren’t feeling musically creative it is much better to have a day of creating samples instead. I’ve had many a day when I’ve either sat in front of a synth experimenting making patches or in front of a microphone recording sounds. Splitting the making samples process from the writing music process can really benefit both areas
3. Experiment as much as possible with different sounds in front of a microphone. You can get some great sounds from simple household objects. One of my favourites is pots and pans (Now everyone thinks I’ve gone mad!) but I’ve ended up layering these sounds together with other drum sounds to create whole new sounds. Try reversing them too and you get these metallic sounding whooshes from pots and pans (I hear them in films all the time). Sounds like you banging on cardboard boxes or slamming doors layered with kick drums can create whole new sounding kicks. Go round your house finding different things to hit with different things. The list is endless, family will think you’ve gone mad but the results can be amazing, interesting and really add something different to your music. That band called Stomp with the metal bins comes to mind.

4. Lots of sounds can be made with the mouth too, check out HumanBeatbox.com. Now you might be thinking but I can’t beatbox like that Gavin TyTe (The guy in the vids). No maybe not, but on that site there are some excellent tutorials on how to replicate kicks, snares and hats with your mouth which can on their own be done quite easily and quickly (the hard part is putting it all together). Then create your own personal HumanBeatBox drum kit in your favourite drum machine software or in Propellerheads Reason or Fruity Loops. The results can be very good especially with some reverb, delay and chorus effects on.
5. Keep a look out on eBay and in your charity shops, I’ve managed to buy some shakers, tambourines for next to nothing. Sampled them as much as I could and then got rid by reselling on eBay or donating back to the charity shop.
6. Make shakers out of containers and those dried peas and rice you can get from the supermarket. Sometimes they might not sound like the real thing but with a little bit of reverb on they can sound pretty good. Plastic drinks bottles or those plastic yoghurt drink bottles work really well for this. Small gravel from the garden is good too.
7. If you have friends who are musicians and create their own samples then maybe you can swap ones you’ve made with ones they’ve made, this can increase your collection and theirs very quickly.
8. Borrow instruments off of friends or relatives, sample them and then give them back. Ask to go round and sample their piano, guitar or violin. Maybe you have a wannabe singer in the family, ask them to do some simple vocal singing phrases.
9. There are some music making magazines which regularly have CDs full of samples on (make sure you check the licensing though and put them in your appropriate folder (see tip #1). I regularly visit my market where there is a magazine stall which sells magazines that are a couple of months old and I pick up these for £1 each. Libraries may also have them if they stock the magazines.
10. Subscribe to our RSS feed or bookmark this site in your favourites as we are going to release lots of sample packs over the coming months which are free to use as well as links to other sites with free samples.

Hopefully from this list of tips and ideas for samples you can go away and maybe introduce something new into your music or create some personalised sound samples. I shall release a few of my own samples which use some of the ideas in this article over the next couple of months so look out for them.

Article written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation

Many musicians who make music with a computer make there drum tracks using software and recorded samples of drums, but all to often they find that their drums just don’t seem to sound like a real drummer could be playing them. These are my tips for getting a drum track to sound more realistic and hopefully they will help some of you to create some amazing drum tracks which will improve the whole feeling in your music.

Firstly we need to realise that a real drummer is not a computer, a real drummer doesn’t hit every drum with exactly the same force every time he hits it and neither does he hit it on the same millisecond of a bar of music every time. So the main aim is to basically make your drum track less perfect.

If you are using the mouse to input notes on the screen you may find that by switching to a MIDI input device you can use it to play each part of your drum track in and it will start to sound more human (Making sure you don’t set it to quantize your notes too harshly). You will find that you will hit each drum with a slightly different force and at a slightly different time, if you make any big mistakes or any notes that just sound off you can always retake or editing using the mouse. If you don’t want to use a MIDI input device you can use these two methods of editing individual drum hits to effectively do exactly the same thing.

• Change each drum hits volume slightly (Changing the force that the drum is hit)
• Change the time a drum hit is hit back or forward very slightly by small amounts

With both of these don’t do it too excessively, we are just looking for a very slight variation. These are the two basic differences between a human player and a computer drum track. This should improve the feel, try experimenting with it, sometimes just changing these two aspects can really change the feel and groove of a rhythm. (Very good experienced drummers will change these two aspects in their drumming on purpose)

There is another thing we can change which is the tone of the drum hit. As a drummer varies the force with which he hits a drum, the tone of the sound produced changes. On most drum machines such as the Redrum in Propellerheads Reason there is a tone feature, by varying this slightly with each drum hit (especially on the snare drum) we can give it more of a human feel. Try making the tone reduce when the volume reduces gives a nice effect.

We can take this further now by making our drums act like real drums. If you use snare rolls a lot, this is a nice way of making them sound much better. Drummers hit drums slightly differently with each hand. So set up two keys on your MIDI input device with the same snare sample on, but vary one ever so slightly in tone, pitch, volume or whatever other properties you want to experiment with and then play the snare hits one after the other creating a snare roll. This drastically improves the sound of snare rolls. You could even have three or four variations of the same hit and change between them.

With the Hi Hat,we often hear a drummer hit the Hi Hat with it open and then quickly close it. This cuts the sound off. So with your Hi Hat you will want to make it so when a Hi Hat closed sample plays it stops the open Hi Hat sample. Some drum machines have this feature built in, so use it effectively. If it isn’t built in yours try varying a Open Hi Hat sounds length according to your track so when the close plays the length cuts off the sound.

This next way is the Ultimate way of getting that real drummer sound, but it is not always practical with samples. If you are recording your own drum samples make sure that you record differing volumes of each drum. Some software allows us to change the sample used depending on the volume of the note. So for example when a MIDI volume message says a note is played at a loudness of 100 to 127 it will play sample 1 (A full whack drum hit), if the MIDI volume message is below say 100 it will play sample 2 (a softer recorded drum hit). We can line these up with as many samples as we wanted (if we have them) and that would create an extremely realistic sounding kit. Often though this is not practical for many people as many drum hits are electronically produce or the hit we want to use only has one recorded sample.

Hopefully this has taught you some of the ways in which you can make your sound less computer sounding and more realistic. These methods certainly improved the realism of my tracks and hopefully it will your too.

Tutorial Written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

In a recent post I talked about how you can make your drum tracks sound more human like if you played them in using a keyboard instead of putting in drum hits with the mouse. I then then later showed you a great little video of a keyboard drummer showing off his skills in a instrument demonstration.
Well guess what?
Here are even more keyboard drummer videos to watch that I have found on YouTube. Enjoy!


Original YouTube Posting by finakajsa.


Original YouTube Posting by DavidMeShow.


Original YouTube Posting by Somesz.


Original YouTube Posting by Stmoo.

If you find any more great keyboard videos post the urls to them in the comments section of this post.

One thing I try to do when creating drums for my tracks is to really try and get a BIG sound. I love big fat drum sounds :-). The drum tracks are the first part of a track that I lay down and I believe that if I can get the drums to sound great to me before putting any other sounds on, I know that my track will sound great to me also. One way I try to get a great drum track is by manipulating every single drum sound and layering it up so for example my main snare sound could have as many as five or six different snare samples in there. These are my tips and also my routine that I use for creating multi layered drum samples.

I use the Redrum in Reason for my drum layering because if you flip it over you can link the gate out on one sample to a gate in on another sample. This means that when sample one gets hit all the samples linked through these gate outs/ins will play together. This means that I can then manipulate each drum sound individually on the front of Redrum and play them together very easily. Whatever software or hardware you use, you need some way of editing each drum sound you are going to layer as well as some easy way to play all sounds together. This should make drum layering a much easier process.

Now you need some samples and there are loads to be had for free around the internet (Free Sound Samples). I doesn’t matter if some of these drum sounds you download sound weak or sound too much like a drum machine as when we layer them up they will sound stronger and very different. You need a good selection of different hits organised into categories (Kicks, Snare etc) so that you can choose a few that you like to layer up easily.

I start off by loading a single hit and manipulate it to how I want it to sound. Usually this is by pitching the drum sound up or down, changing the length, change the tone etc. Just do what sounds good to you for that particular drum sound. Don’t be afraid to change it drastically, or edit it in a audio editor either.

Now I find another drum sound that sounds nice with my first sound, I link the samples together (explained above) and listen to them together. You want to get a nice sounding mix between these two drum sounds so you can hear them both at the level you want to hear each of them. Now edit our new drum sample exactly like we did with the first by changing the pitch etc until we find something that sounds like what we want and mixes nicely with the other drum sound (re-adjust the levels if you have to). Now repeat this by layering up even more samples until you are happy with the overall sound of all samples together.

After this add any processing (for example a bit of compression or EQ). The example above shows a very basic drum layering technique and the more you do this yourself the more you will find different combinations of samples that will sound great with each other and find your own techniques that give you your own sound.

Here are some more of my tips that I use for multi-layering certain drums.

• Multi-layering kick drums can be trickiest as when we add more and more kicks our drum sound can actually sound weaker and more muffled as they are all fighting for space. You can stop this from happening by EQing each kick to have different dominant frequencies. For example if you are layering 3 kicks, on kick one increase the volume of 30Hz to 60Hz (or decrease the frequencies outside this band), on kick two increase the volume of 80Hz to 120Hz and on kick three increase say 150Hz to 180Hz. This will give each of our kicks a different space in the mix between them.
• Try layering bass sounds with your kicks. Create a very quick bass sound so it’s the length of your kick, filter out any high frequencies and then layering it together with your kick can give a nice low end sounding kick if done properly.
• For snares reduce one sample in length so it’s very short with hardly any tail (a snare that sounds poppy or cracky at the start) and layer this with another sound that has a nice sounding tail will create a very nice effect. This works great too with layering different crash and ride cymbals as well as other drums.
• Pitch up and down the same sample. For example take sample one and pitch it down, then take the same sample in another channel and pitch it up. Try this with already layered samples, by exporting your multi layered samples then reimporting.
• and finally experiment with different drum sounds as much as you can, drum layering seriously increases the number of samples and styles of drum hits available to us for music production and is well worth having a mess around with.

There is a lot to the art of drum layering, but I think once you know the basics you will develop your own techniques and way of doing it and in the process the sound of your music will benefit and you will create your own sounding style by creating different drum sounds that others don’t have.

Tutorial written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

Found this brilliant little video of a Drum & Bass band called London Elektricity. They show you how they play Drum & Bass live which can seem a strange concept at first to musicians who use computers for composition. I like the way in which they describe about how they use instruments such as drum pads to clearly show that a sample is being played by that particular musician. Sometimes when watching electronic music artists and bands it can just look like the musicians are just standing behind some equipment and your not sure what they are actually doing.

What else can we learn from this video? Well for a start we can also learn that regular backing up of the sounds that are in samplers and synths might be a great idea.


Original YouTube Posting by dizrespect.

I came across this article today complete with audio examples, about a psychology science experiment devised by Jessica Phillips-Sliver and Laurel Trainor looking into whether movement itself (dance) may affect the way in which we perceive music and sounds.

I thought I would bring this little experiment to your attention not only because I thought it was rather interesting scientifically speaking, but because it also shows how accenting different specific beats within a rhythm can affect the overall sound of the drum rhythm. All three sound examples on that page have exactly the same rhythm just different beats are more pronounced than others. This is a technique that you can use in your own drum beats to give different feelings at different points in your composition.

Visit the article on Cognitive Daily