Drum kit sample construction.

[RABid]

I’m getting ready to edit and build some kits using Battery. I am wondering if there are any standards to go by as far as volume for each drum and cymbal. Should all samples be normalized? Is so, to what point? People here frequently ask for reference CD’s for mixing various styles of music. Are there any reference kits to mix to when I construct my on? I do not plan on sampling my on sounds. What I will do is combine drums, cymbals and percussion instruments from various collections to create custom kits. Robert

[mix2much]

Please don't normalize the samples. It is so not necessary. You want them to be different volumes. It will be tough to determine what sample should be at what volume without hearing the song it's going in. Your best bet is to separate the kick, snare and toms, and the cymbals. That way you can compress the kick, throw some verb on the snare and toms and have sontrol over the cymblas volumes as they tend to be way too loud :) Hope this helps.

[not Cereal]

i have been creating sampled drum kits for 5 years. its an ongoing process, and you keep learning. some things ive learned: 1. use the GM map as a base. modify the map to suit your custom kit(s) 2. spend time creating the drums. get many drum hits off the same drum. soft kicks, hard kicks, splat kicks, etc. 3. create realistic velocity zones in your sampler. if your sampler has no velocity zones, get a different sampler. place the differnt kicks you created in #2 into the velocity zones. one key can now play many different samples depending on how hard you hit the key. listen to drum tracks. listen to drum tracks. listen to drum tracks. use only 4 fingers to play the drums on the keyboard. drummers have four limbs and play in a way that accomodates four limbs. dont be dissapointed when what youve done doesnt sound like drums. keep learning.

[RABid]

Thanks for the tips. I plan to do a bit of this over the Thanksgiving holiday. [quote]Originally posted by mix2much@excite.com: [b]Please don't normalize the samples. It is so not necessary. You want them to be different volumes....[/b][/quote]I assumed different volumes would come primarily from velocity of the notes when playing the samples rather than the variances of volume between light and hard strikes? I may be going at this wrong. My original idea was the ability to swap out kits or individual drums without having to adjust midi velocity of those swapped drums. It may be that I should set up my kits and my standard Sonar II templates so that bass, snare, toms and cymbals have separate sub-tracks and handle variances there. Robert