| Drum Samples Volume and Velocity |
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| Written by JohnGellei | |
| Monday, 09 November 2009 | |
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Adjusting the volume of drum samples is the easiest mixing process to consider, both at the start, during, and at the end of the production process. Even with regular instrument tracks, it's as easy as it gets. Adjusting the volume of certain tracks will allow others to fit in and not clash all that much, hopefully not at all! It comes quite naturally to even people who have just come into the music production game.
Adjusting the volume of drum samples is the easiest mixing process to consider, both at the start, during, and at the end of the production process. Even with regular instrument tracks, it's as easy as it gets. Adjusting the volume of certain tracks will allow others to fit in and not clash all that much, hopefully not at all! It comes quite naturally to even people who have just come into the music production game. Adjusting the volume is possible in multiple places in most major sequencers and on keyboard workstations. For instance, Propellerheads' Reason allows you to adjust volume on each bus for each drum sample, on the Redrum drum console and also in the main sequencer mixer, making it easy to make major and minor changes on the fly. This certainly helps the creative process as you can be altering this whenever you feel like it at a moment's notice. An essential rule to volume mixing that every single music producer and beat maker should note is that you should never introduce a sound into a beat if that sound cannot be heard. The best that sound can do is muddy things up, and the worst it can do is totally destroy the mix as a whole. A drum samples beat is only as good as the weakest single track, so if one of the sounds is not pulling its weight in the mix, it may be time to let it go and look at something else. Professional mixing engineers will tell you exactly the same. So have your sounds contribute equally and watch your mix take off. You can expect that a sound's volume, when lowered by 6 decibels, will be lowered just about half, and the same thing on the way up; raising a sound by 6 decibels will double its volume. When adjusting the volume of hi hats, it's a good idea to let it sit where you think it should and then take a few decibels off that further. Because the human ear has a tendency to overcompensate for these higher frequencies, so they don't need to be as high. Velocity and volume are not the same things. Lowering volume does make a sound quieter, but velocity comes in at another level as well. If you are manipulating a multi-sampled drum samples patch, then playing at a different velocity can even trigger a different sample entirely. This is true performance playing and synthesizing. You should always take care when lowering volume, and never make decisions recklessly. Pay attention with every creative decision. One tip offered by a lot of professional mixers is that sounds should be lowered and never increased in volume. This will ensure that no clipping occurs and that sounds are the best volume they could possibly be. With drum samples, try to mix it in as a group, separate from the mix, before mixing it together. About the Author: If you want the best drum samples available, check out My Drum Samples here: http://www.mydrumsamples.com/ From the Webmaster: "Having the opportunity to share my hobbies and interests with so many people around the world gives me great satisfaction. As a bonus, I blog and produce websites about topics that interest me and receive ad revenue from the websites and Blogs."
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