If your ever looking for a specific sample one of the best places you could go to search would be The Freesound Project. At the time of writing this they have over 40,000 samples, all available via a search tool. All samples are provided free for you to use by other people around the world under the creative commons license (which basically means you can use it as you like as long as you mention the person who made the sample).

I have heard somewhere that a sample of a scream from The Freesound Project was used in the film “Children of Men” and the user was properly credited in the credits, so if you make your own samples, why not upload them. You never know you may hear your sample in the next big movie.

I like The Freesound Project a lot and I shall certainly be using it to search for sounds when I need that sound I can’t make myself. But remember to attribute the sample creator, great tools like this wouldn’t exist without them.

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

Last week I told you about The Freesound Project and I’m sure you’ve been finding all the samples you’ll ever need there. If you still can’t find that needed sample, here is another site called SoundSnap which currently at the time of writing has 30,000 sound samples, again supplied by generous people from all over the world. All sounds are provided free for you to use Royalty Free and there is a great search and category layout which makes it easy to find the sound you want.


The sound preview feature is very good and very fast. Samples are available in wav or mp3 format and sometimes aiff format. I suggest you get the wav format ones if your using the sounds in your music as they should be the better quality. There is also a ratings system to rate the sounds. We like SoundSnap a lot and I have started searching it quite a bit and best of all, it’s Free (my favourite word ).

Here is a great list of 10 sites I have come across which you will be able to find most of the samples and sounds you require for your music production or anything else you might need a certain sound for. I have listed whether they are Royalty Free or if they are copyrighted in anyway as best as I can.

Audio Skull - Download free beats and samples for music production (Royalty FREE)

BBC OneMusic Sample Bank - Over one thousand samples to use in your music free (Free to use for non-commercial purposes)

Find Sounds - Free site where you can search the Web for sound effects and musical instrument samples (Unsure about copyright of samples as finds sounds from multiple sources)

Looperman - Loads of loops, beats and samples for free for members (Membership is free though) (Royalty Free)

Philharmonia Orchestra Sound Exchange - Loads of single hits, phrases and full orchestra samples played by the Philharmonia Orchestra (Free to use for non-commercial purposes)

SampleNet - Nice set of samples, most are in Mp3 format though (Copyright Free)

SampleSwap - A completely free and lovingly maintained collection of 10,000+ quality audio samples, drum loops and vocal snippets. (Royalty Free)

Soundsnap.com - Find and share free sound effects and loops (Royalty Free)

The Freesound Project - Collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sound for musicians and sound lovers (Royalty Free as long as you specify sample maker in credits - Creative Commons License)

Worldsamples.com - Loads of sound effects, most are free (Creative Commons License)

If you know of any others, post it in the comments of this post. Hope you enjoy searching these sites and find the sounds you want.

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.

Sine, Square, Triangle and Sawtooth are the basic waveforms (a graphical representation of a sound) used in most popular synthesizers. Most oscillators (The part of a synthesizer which generates the basic waveform) can produce all four of these basic waveforms. All are very different sounding and have their own characteristics which can greatly affect the mood of the sound synthesized.

I believe that by learning what each of these basic waveforms sounds and looks like can be a great way for anyone starting out using synthesizers to be able to start learning to hear a synthesized sound and then go on to reproduce that sound on their own.

Below are images of these four basic waveforms as well as audio examples for each.

Sine Wave
The wave that most of use will visually imagine when we hear the word wave. Can be great for producing very low bass sounds that sound smooth.




Square
As the name suggest the waveform looks square and this creates a unique sound compared to the other four waveforms.




Triangle
A triangle wave is a very basic waveform where the pattern rises and then falls by the same gradient creating a triangle shape.




Sawtooth
The dirtiest sounding of the four basic waves, it is named sawtooth because it looks like the teeth of a saw. You can also get a reverse sawtooth waveform where the slow gradient and steep fall are swapped around.




Hopefully this article has allowed you to see and hear the basic waveforms so you can begin to identify them when you hear sounds that have been created using these waveforms as a starting point.

All images of the waveforms are made using Audacity Article written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation

I used to make a lot of hard house music and one of the most common sounds in hard house and similar types of hard dance music is the hoover sound. Even though it is used a lot (sometimes too much) some people have trouble recreating this sound themselves and end up using samples. The original sound was made on the Roland Juno Synthesizer and I’ve even heard of people buying that synth just to create this type of sound and spending hundreds of their hard earned cash in the process. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a basic hoover without a Juno. If your not sure what a hoover synth is then play the sound below.


Click Here To Download Sound

I made that hoover style sound above as an example for this tutorial using the Malstrom and the NN-XT sampler in Reason within a few minutes and I’m going to show you how to get that style of synth sound so you can make all the hoovers you require without a Juno and also so I don’t have to hear a hoover sample that I’ve heard hundreds of times before next time I listen to some new hard house/dance tracks.

The following tutorial is done in Reason but you should be able to reproduce this sound using any synthesizer or softsynth which is good at making some sort of nice fat lead sound.

Creating the Starting Sound
First we need to create a fat lead type sound, I shall leave you to choose one yourself here as most synthesizers should be able to create sounds which are good enough. I used the Malstrom in Reason, I chose the preset in the soundbank called EBM Lead and just turned off Filter A. Here is that sound, so you can get an idea of the sort of sound that you need to start off with.


Click Here To Download Sound

As you can see it’s nothing special, it is in fact just 2 x Sawtooth like waves with one of them an octave lower than the other. There is nothing special about this sound and you can find samples of this sort of sound all over the internet for free. Experiment with different sorts of lead synth sounds as your starting point for the hoover, but to get a real fat hoover you need something that sounds quite fat to begin with. You want to aim for lots of high and low frequencies in there as it will make the hoover sound fatter and more Juno sounding.

Making The Hoover
This is the bit which most people who try to make hoover sounds and fail don’t know about. We need to use a sampler such as the NN-XT in Reason which allows you to use a mod envelope (ADSR) to control the pitch of the sound. I’m sure that there are many other samplers that can do this too.

For this you need to first export the sound from your synthesizer and save it as a sample to reload into your sampler. You want to create a very long sample or create a loop in the sampler so you can hold the sample down for a long time without it ending.

Once you’ve loaded the sample into you’re sampler, you need to make the mod envelope affect the pitch of the sample. For the example I set the mod env to pitch setting to +600cents (about the 2-O-Clock position) on the NN-XT. I increased the attack on the mod envelope to about midway up and the decay just that bit higher than the attack. The sustain, release and hold were set to none.

I also made the sound play three notes at one time to give it more substance, these were C3, C4 and C5 on the MIDI keyboard and placed a notch filter on the sample with the frequency set about half way. Now we have the basic hoover sound, you can now go and add some effects on if you want to make it sound even better.

See it isn’t that hard to create a hoover once you know how it’s done. Hopefully this has shown you that you can create Hoover type sounds very easily and quickly within Reason. You don’t need a Roland Juno or other fancy kit to create one. You can also achieve this with most synthesizers and a sampler with the mod envelope to pitch ability. Experiment with the hoover sounds too by starting with different starting synths, there are loads that can be made. If you use Reason there are some great ones that can be made with the Subtractor and Malstrom as a starting point.

Tutorial written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.