Workflow questions with drum samples

[rlared]

I have many questions about working with drum samples:
1) I see constant sales for huge sample packs at places like ADSR, Black Octopus, etc. Many times they include drum loops, one shots, bass loops, etc. Are there places where you can get large cheap downloads of just drum oneshots without all the other crap?
2) How do you organize your samples? Something like XO or ADSR sample manager? Or do you sort through a ton of folders and subfolders in your DAW browser?
3) Do you build your own kits sample by sample, or do you buy packs that have kits already created that can easily be imported to a drum sampler all at once?

[ksandvik]

1. Depends but never underestimate all the samples you get from modern DAWs today.
2. Most DAWs have good search engines so you could search by name, keywords of even by proximity sound-alikes, no need to organize, just get them to a place the DAW knows to index.
3. This is all personal, but most of the time I handle kicks, snares and hihats as separate samples, or then use a pre-defined kit and go from that.

[Starbright]

1. Depends but never underestimate all the samples you get from modern DAWs today.
2. Most DAWs have good search engines so you could search by name, keywords of even by proximity sound-alikes, no need to organize, just get them to a place the DAW knows to index.
3. This is all personal, but most of the time I handle kicks, snares and hihats as separate samples, or then use a pre-defined kit and go from that.

totally agree. normally I just favourite the loops and sounds I like and the the rest alone.
When it comes to buying one shots: both Splice and Loopcloud let you search via differetn tags, including one-shots.

My current prefered way to work with samples is toeiter use Slate drums or Kantakt for the acoustic side, Logic Pro's drumrack and sliced loops with Logic Pro's sampler.
But truth be told, if you use Logic, Bitwig, Ableton or FL, you allready got all the samples you need.
But depending on the genre UJAM might be a good choice for libraries (at least V2).
Otherwise Monster DAW has also a free, flexible drum plugin.

[ThomekAV]

I have a hard time organizing one shot samples. Currently all my sample packs have their own folder structure but this way I seem to lose track of what I actually have because I don't feel like going through all the samples folder by folder. Hence I'm giving XLN XO a try now hoping that it would give me a better workflow.

[TechHaus]

I pretend I am using a (real / 90's) MPC and curate "disks" of samples from time to time, sometimes per project depending on what I am doing.

I am pulling from my big one shots library that is basically set up the way I downloaded them.

Then I can include the "disk" when archiving the project so I know I can open it years later.

Hope that concept makes sense.

[ksandvik]

Curation is good! I'm starting to even build drum racks with just kicks (Ableton Live) or Sampler (LogicProX) for quickly switching between kick sound to find a good one. Some drum sw synths like Battery has similar 'one type only' presets. Hey I might build something similar in Battery for cross-DAW use....

Tagging is the new 'in-thing' but I've learned that if the samples have good names it's as fast to find them via the indexed search most modern DAWs have.

[ThomekAV]

Curation is good! I'm starting to even build drum racks with just kicks (Ableton Live) or Sampler (LogicProX) for quickly switching between kick sound to find a good one. Some drum sw synths like Battery has similar 'one type only' presets. Hey I might build something similar in Battery for cross-DAW use....

Tagging is the new 'in-thing' but I've learned that if the samples have good names it's as fast to find them via the indexed search most modern DAWs have.

I thought about tagging samples but how do you tag thousands of samples? I mean that's quite a lot of work, though it might be worth it in the end. Some AI tagging tool would come in handy.

[Zeisner]

1) For real drums I use samples ripped from romplers like Addictive Drums (to save CPU and RAM), custom recorded samples or stock stuff because they sound usually better than anything else.

2) and 3) I use SoundFonts for quick previews. One for kicks, one for toms, one for snares etc. If I found the right sounds I drag the single samples or SoundFonts (which are in the same folders as the preview SoundFonts) into the project and remove the preview SoundFonts from the project. I always make my own kits. I don't use any pre-made synth drum samples, I create them on the fly so there's not much to organize in this category.