In this day and age of electronic music production, drum samples come a dime a dozen. There are literally hundreds of thousands of drum samples out there to download for free, so why do some people still insist on paying for drum samples? Why do some people get so frustrated just trying to pick a few drum samples for their song? It all comes down to getting sounds that are right for your genre. It also doesn’t help that most drum sound files are poorly organized – this can add valuable minutes to the searching you must do. Furthermore, many of the samples are poorly named and this leads to hours of auditioning that shouldn’t be necessary.

Rap, Urban and Hip Hop styles: There are so many ways to alter drums to fit these genres. In fact, it’s easier than producing for anything else because some of these styles – hip hop and rap specifically – are basically just mixtures of different cultures and different music, and they contain sub-genres for all different types of music. So fitting samples to these genres is quite easy – most samples could pass for hip hop drum samples. To get an old-school type sound, you could really do it the authentic way and start chopping up vinyls – not physically, of course – just extract the audio using a turntable and look for the drum breaks to ‘chop.’

RnB and Soul: These styles are very different from the urban genres we’ve discussed. To start with, the obsession with bass-laden kick drums and snappy snares is not as evident when listening to these genres. You can go far by just using some well-shaped drum samples that are not over the top. Variance is the keyword here, with everything being coherent at the same time. There is not as much sound selection freedom here, however.

Dance: When we speak about dance, we usually mean the music played in late-night dance clubs in major cities around the world. One tradition here is to place the kick drum on every single beat, and this is a very easy technique to pick up. One sound quality that distinguishes dance is its openness to kick drum samples that have a pitch attached, and not as monotonous as in rap and hip-hop.

Using these tips to make and alter sounds is just part of the process, of course. What makes the rhythmic elements of these genres unique is the timing, signatures and syncopation, among other distinguishing characteristics.

Some closing words on drum samples: try to organize them neatly. If you can develop your own folder of go-to samples for different genres (or styles within a genre), you will save hours of searching as you make beats. Start making descriptive folders and become familiar with the way you organize.

Time for you to find out how to make your own beats! Start with a beginner’s tutorial, grab some nice sounds and let creativity do the rest. You’ll never ask “how can I make my own beats” again.