Drum Samples: Uncompressed or Not?
Using uncompressed drum samples can be very unappealing to new music producers and beat makers, but anybody who has a real love for audio and an unbridled admiration of music and sounds that are true to their source will venture into the compression-less world sooner or later. Compression is basically the process of increasing the volume of the quiet parts of a song, piece of music or drum sound. It has been around since at least the 60s, possibly earlier.
Compression on drum samples can come into your workflow at two stages. The first is the drum sample selection process. This is where you’ll find the samples that were appropriately compressed by the library manufacturer, and hopefully not overly compressed. If you’re finding that a lot of your samples are ‘banging’ and very loud before even coming into your song, you’re probably dealing with samples that have had all the life sucked out of them already.
The second point at which compression will play apart is the final mixing process. This is where you would electively apply some compression using software or hardware audio compressors on drum samples or slight applications to soft instruments like the piano. The main creative difference here is that you are not subject to the over-compression used by many sound editors. Your decisions from here are truly coming from you.
Nearly every song that plays on the pop radio stations has a great drum pattern, with all drum samples cutting through the mix. This is very important as a lot of car radios still have speakers that aren’t so great at getting all the frequencies across, so a good mix is essential. While over-compression has had a lot of ’stick’ in the audiophile community, creative uses are not scarce. You just need to look to dance music and analyze the ‘ducking effecting to see how popular some creative compression can become in a genre.
If any of the sounds you pick are necessary but overly compressed nonetheless, there are ways of adding some color back onto the canvas, and one of the first steps you could look at is editing the actual wav sample. You should be able to see the spike at the start of the sample if it does not encompass all of it. Then lower the volume of that section but allow it to blend in. What you may want to do is mix this with a similar, uncompressed sample and set the latter to about 30% mix. This will give the sample some extra crispness, and while some of the same frequencies will be boosted, the overall effect will be much more natural.
A popular compression process that many Rock n Roll and Hip Hop producers are huge advocates of is the NY Compression technique. At its most basic level, it’s simply taking the same sample, one version of which has been compressed to the maximum amount and mixing it with itself. So you have a drum sample that is very punchy and cutting, while it still shows signs of the original variance.
If you want to make rap beats, good on you! It can be easy for some, hard for others. An important step when making rap beats is learning rhythm, so if you have that, you’re one step ahead of the pack.
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