Sound/Sample Management?

[AbsolutNut]

Hi,

Okay, this is a problem I come across time after time. I have got some beats working, perhaps a b-line etc. Melodies & chords start to develop and I have an idea in my head of what type of sound I need.

How do I find this sound quickly. I have say 30 VSTis & say 20,000 samples. Sample management in particular is a problem. How do you gents/ladies do it. I want a particular SFX for example, is it simply a case of trawling through my huge library until I find something suitable? I do this now and boy does it destroy the creative flow.

I know I can go through my instruments and make notes of patches I like. Quite often though in the middle of a project it is impossible to predict what type of sounds might be needed. I need an easier way of knowing what sounds are available and where.

I would be very interested to know and methods you peeps use. I am just about to do a re-install of my DAW so I felt this might be a good time to ask.

(Apologies if this subject as been done to death in the past)

Regards,
Steve

[pitchdrifter]

find a sampler of your choice, make your own libraries based on categories. e.g. sfx-spacy.sfz would have the fx one-shot samples mapped one sample per key.
While you do this, also adjust the level of the sample mappings so you roughly have consistent loudness throughout.

Working like this makes calling up the samples really fast, especially since you have all sounds of a certain category at your fingertips while a song is playing.. you can try them all out simply by hitting noodling on the keyboard.

Same thing for drum samples.. kicks, snares, hihats etc.etc.
When you have too many sounds for a single category, break it down into sub-categories. Like instead of just sfx.sfz you could have sfx-spacy.sfz, sfx-dark.sfz, sfx-shrill.sfz etc.etc. (I'm using .sfz since I use sfz and sfz+ for this work).


hth

Markus

[AbsolutNut]

Hi Marcus,

I use Kontakt. Is it easy to set up categories of samples in Kontakt. I know there is the 'favorites' function but couldn't seem to get it work the way I wanted it to work.

I am quite happy to work with categories though mapping samples across the keyboard sounds time-consuming. I can see ur logic though for doing this.

Incidentally, I also use FL Studio. Does any1 know if there is an easy way to create sample/sound categories in FL Studio. I think I tried a while back creating category folders in windows explorer. Then I tried creating shortcuts to samples. The shortcuts didn't work in FL Studio - instead just appearing as empty category folders.

It would be great if either in Kontakt/FL Studio or any other software if I could create shortcuts to samples in my library based on categories and then be able to browse these categories easily & quickly.

Regards,
Steve

[pitchdrifter]

one of the ideas behind mapping them to keyboard is to get rid of bad/useless samples in the process. Also most editors are rather easy to work, you just drag'n drop samples, or chose 'import' and have them automatically mapped (like the freeware editor for sfz does it), then you just go through them adjusting volume, adding loops wherever you want any etc.

Markus

[boin]

Incidentally, I also use FL Studio. Does any1 know if there is an easy way to create sample/sound categories in FL Studio.

I use FL's "File Settings" to point to my main sample folders (I use three: drums, voice and instruments). These folders and all their contents (sub-folders included) are then available on FL's browser.