Pro Tools: Creating Drum Sample Libraries

Here, a snare top and bottom mic sample are being bounced together via a bus, so that the final sample contains the complete snare sound.

There are many great virtual drum instruments around, but sometimes it’s best to create your own!

There are many ways to finesse a drum recording at the mix stage, from manual editing to audio quantisation tools like Elastic Audio and Beat Detective. And as virtual drum instruments have evolved, many producers now prioritise the control and flexibility of MIDI‑triggered drums over traditional audio‑based editing. However, replacing or augmenting real drum performances with third‑party samples from a virtual instrument can compromise the individuality of the drummer’s sound. A hybrid approach, using samples derived from the original drum recording, offers the best of both worlds: the control that virtual instruments offer, without changing the core drum sound itself. That’s what we’re looking at in this workshop.

The advantages of this are threefold. It retains the character of the original performance, it avoids the potential for sonic mismatches between the original and replacement drum sounds, and it provides the kind of forensic control over timing and dynamics that users of drum virtual instruments are accustomed to. So how do you do it?

Sample Recording

Creating a library of drum samples can be time‑consuming if you’re doing it properly. There’s a lot of editing and file management involved. If you only need to fix a couple of snare hits this might be overkill. But if you want full control while staying faithful to the sound of the original performance, here are some tips to get you started.

Firstly, while it is possible to create a library from a performance, if you anticipate wanting to go deep into sampling, it’s well worth putting some time aside for capturing some clean samples at the tracking stage. In the same way that a film crew’s sound recordist captures clean ‘room tone’ to help with edits later on, spend some time with the drummer capturing a variety of clean hits at varying velocities and with all the articulations you anticipate needing.

Often this isn’t possible, but identifying clean hits from the performance can usually still give perfectly usable results — you just might not have the luxury of clean tails, and so may need to edit the samples a little tighter. You’ll need several alternative hits at each velocity, and while you might think that getting a lot of variety in your hits will add life and authenticity, in my experience, the most consistent hits give the best results. Hits that sound identical inevitably aren’t, but if you use only a single sample, you’ll immediately hear the artificial ‘machine‑gunning’ effect of the same sample being repeated too close together.

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