Hits FAQ

Did you sample the drums yourself?

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:46:32 +0000

Yes, I picked and sampled the drum sounds myself using Adobe Audition. I did the samples editing work in a treated room were the sound is outputed by M-audio BX8a studio monitors.

Did you tune the drum sounds yourself?

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:23:29 +0000

I analyzed/established the pitch/key for every single percussion sound. But, I did not pitched them to reach a certain note - not even one single sound got tuned like that, they are in the original keys they were played in - there is absolutely no pitching involved from my part, not even a few cents.

Of course, you can do that. To exemplify, if you have a kick who is in the right key, but fits even better into the song when you change the pitch up or down a few cents, you should definitely do the change. Just beware that pitch is a destructive effect and can make your samples sound odd. Anyway, as a producer you should already know that you must always use your ears.

How many snares, kicks etc are in each note group? For example, in A# how many kicks would there be in your kit?

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:34:02 +0000

There's not a fixed number - but, I can assure you they are plenty for each key as the library contains 18500+ drum samples. Just for your particular question, there are 641 kicks in A#.

So, when I am selecting drums for my tracks, I can match up my kicks, hi-hats, snares etc. all with the same note using this library?

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:29:03 +0000

Yes, you can match your kicks with the same note as the hi-hats and snare. But, you will also get nice results by matching the kick to the root key of the song and then the others percussion elements with different notes which are in the musical scale of the song. So, to exemplify this procedure, when you have a beat which has a trumpet/horn that strikes on the 3rd and 7th note of the beat maybe you will want the snare to be in tune with that because it will sound much better. Anyway, it's all about being in the scale of the song with the drums you pick. The "root key rule " is best applied just for the kicks.

You have processed the drums using outboard eq/compression etc, or are they the raw original sounds?

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:16:27 +0000

IN-TUNE hits contains the raw original drums used in the piece of music they were cut from (the music I've sampled the sounds from varies from Funk, R&B, Rock, Hip-Hop, Soul, Foreign Soundtracks, Jazz and other musical genres) so, they have only the effects the original drums had.
I haven't applied any destructive effects like equalization or compression on the samples - just a simple normalization and very rarely a sensitive noise reduction.
I think keeping the effects applyied on sounds to a minimum is the way to go when making such a library because some drums work in your mix just like that with the original compression. Also, over-compression is a thing you surely want to avoid. Second, the reason I didn't used equalization is that for every single mix you will mostly use slightly different EQ parameters for that particular drum sound.

You sampled the drums from vinyl records?

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:49:43 +0000

IN TUNE Hits drum library contains samples from vinyl but also from digital materials which were never available on vinyl and even live studio drums played by myself in the studio.