Every beat is built from a few drum sounds. Knowing what each one does makes it easier to pick sounds that work together, and to hear what’s missing from a beat.
To use a drum sound from a song or a video, DOT ($49 once, free for 10 recordings) records anything your Mac plays and trims each take, ready to drop on a pad.
The sounds of a kit
| Sound | What it does in a beat |
|---|---|
| Kick | The low thump, usually on the beat. It gives the beat its weight |
| Snare | The crack on 2 and 4, the backbeat that people clap along to |
| Clap | A brighter backbeat, on its own or layered with the snare |
| Hi-hat | The short tick that keeps time between the kick and snare |
| Open hat | A longer hiss, often just before the snare, to lift the beat |
| 808 | A long, low kick that also plays a bass line, from the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The base of trap |
| Toms | Pitched drums, high to low, mostly for fills |
| Rim | The click of a stick on the snare’s rim, for quiet, sparse beats |
| Shaker | A soft, steady rattle that fills the space between hats |
| Crash and ride | Cymbals. The crash marks the start of a section, the ride keeps time like a bigger hat |
Play them free, from your keyboard
The free web drum pad plays 16 drum sounds from the keys of your keyboard, or by clicking and tapping on a phone:
- Bottom row: Z kick, X snare, C 808, V a second kick.
- Middle row: A hat, S shaker, D clap, F rim.
- Top rows: Q open hat, W E R toms high to low, and
1crash,2ride,3a vocal and4a stab.
The hats cut each other off like on a real kit, so a closed hat stops an open one. You can drop your own WAV, AIFF or MP3 on any pad. To build a beat from the same sounds, use the drum sequencer, which downloads the beat as WAV or MIDI.
Get drum sounds as files
The drum pad plays its sounds in the browser, but doesn’t give you files. For WAV files to use in a song:
- 99Sounds’ 99 Drum Samples I and II. 209 WAV files, 24-bit: kicks, snares, hats, claps, toms, cymbals and percussion. Free to use in your own music, commercial songs included, but not to share or sell as files.
- GarageBand and Logic. Their drum kits come free with the app, and play from MIDI. GarageBand is free on every Mac.
- Your own recordings. A slap on a desk, a closing door, a pen on a glass. Record it, cut it so it starts on the hit, and it’s a drum sound nobody else has.
Sounds from a song
The snare from a favourite record is a drum sound too. Record it while the song plays, cut it to the single hit, and drop it on a pad. How to sample a song on a Mac walks through it, including what you need before you release a song with someone else’s sound in it.
On a Mac, Drum Pad ($19 once), a 3×3 drum pad in the menu bar, takes any WAV or MP3 you drop on a pad, so your own sounds play from Q W E / A S D / Z X C over any app.
Picking sounds that work together
- One sound for each range. The kick and 808 are low, the snare and clap are in the middle, the hats and cymbals are high. Two sounds in the same range blur together.
- Match the kick and the 808. In trap, the 808 often replaces the kick, or the kick is short so the 808 can ring.
- Short sounds on fast parts. A hat played every sixteenth needs to be short, or it turns into a hiss.
- Same space for all of them. Dry sounds with dry sounds, roomy with roomy, so they sound like one kit.
Sources
2
- 99 Drum Samples I and II and the licence, 99Sounds
- TR-808, Roland
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