Creating a Cohesive Sampler Drum Kit

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Drums are a major aspect of most tracks, dictating groove and pulse. The sonic character of the drum kit can also dictate a track’s overall aesthetic. This is huge, as the “wrong” drum kit could cause listeners to interpret your track differently than you’d like.

In this article, we discuss considerations when creating a drum track, from sample choice to mixing. We cover how to find drums that already work together, ways to put the drums in the same space, and mixing techniques to glue your drums together.

Sample choice

Sample choice is arguably the most important step when creating a custom drum kit.

There are plenty of effects and mixing techniques you can use to drastically change a drum sample. But as the saying goes, “you can’t polish a turd.” It’s better to minimize additional processing and find samples that work well right off the bat.

This starts with using high-quality samples. Regardless of whether your drum samples make sense together or not, the drum kit as a whole won’t sound impressive with subpar samples. Packs from well-known sample distributors or sample databases like Splice Sounds are great resources to find these high-quality samples

Assuming you have access to good samples, the next step is to choose samples that work well together. It’s perfectly normal to have a sample or two that stand out as unique from the rest of the kit, like an interesting snare or percussion sound. However, in order to create a specific and consistent aesthetic for the track, the majority of your drum samples should work together.

A good place to start is with one of the main drum sounds—the kick or snare / clap. These drum sounds will provide much of the sonic character for your drum kit, and in turn your track. Having these decided will make choosing hat, cymbal, and percussion samples much easier.

I personally like starting with the snare / clap. The backbeat often stands out in the groove, so the sonic character of the snare / clap is usually quite audible in the final mix. Therefore, it can have a bigger impact on the track’s final sonic aesthetic than the kick will.

How to choose a kick

With the snare chosen, the kick is next. You can take one of two approaches here:

1. Pick a kick drum of the same “world” as the snare / clap that you’ve chosen. This creates a solid base for the kit, which will already start to sound like a coherent group of samples. From here, you can fill out the rest of the kit with hats, cymbals, and percussion that reference the theme you’re going with.
2. Pick a more subtle, round kick that allows the snare to stand out. While this won’t create the cohesiveness of the previous approach, this will allow for an interesting snare sound in your track. This can be a cool effect, almost making the snare another instrument. The remaining samples can be chosen according to the kick or the snare, depending on what the track calls for.

Keep in mind that the same approaches are available for selecting a snare sample if you pick the kick first.

So we know the drum samples should sonically “work together,” but how do we accomplish this?

A good test is to find one or two adjectives that can describe every sample in the kit. If you’re able to do this, your drum kit has a common characteristic and should sound pretty coherent. Some common descriptors might be “lo-fi,” “acoustic,” “synthesized,” etc. You can even pick an adjective before building the kit for some direction when choosing samples.

This keyword method is especially useful when using a sample database to find new drum samples for a track. Many of these databases have filters you can use to find the samples you’re looking for.

Splice Sounds has a powerful filtering system, making it extremely easy to find samples with a particular characteristic. If I wanted to create an acoustic kit, I could search for acoustic drums or individually search for acoustic kicks, snares, etc.

One of the main obstacles when creating a drum kit is that the process can feel somewhat abstract, like it’s detached from actually making music. Drum samples will never be isolated in the full track, so it’s tough to know whether they really work together or not if you’re just clicking through samples.

Any method that allows you to hear the drum samples played together in a groove is much better.

If you’re in the search for new samples and you’re using Splice Sounds, there’s an easy way to do this. The Beat Maker on Splice allows you to drag samples into an eight-cell sampler. This can be played with your computer keyboard, or you can set up a groove with the built-in sequencer. By playing a simple drum groove, you should be able to tell whether you have the right samples or not.

Color-coded session