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Drum Samples Don’t Cut It: Get Custom Drum Tracksfrom an Online Session Drummer
Drum Sample Software
 will make your music sound staleand take up all your time. Get
Custom Drum Tracks
Online.This article is for the benefit of you, thesongwriter/composer.Undoubtedly you need professional soundingdrum tracks for your music. But how to get great drum sounds without breaking the bank?Many folks see the solution to the problem indrum sample software, such as the BFD premium drum module.People feel this is the solution because, admittedly, the drumsamples involved in the software tend to have drum soundsthat are very good. Generally, the drums are well-tuned andrecorded well. But there are drawbacks.The biggest two drawbacks to using drum sample softwareare:1)“Canned”, uninspired results -- drum tracks that sounddisconnected from your music.2) Large amounts of time being wasted putting together“custom” tracks slice-by-slice with individual-hit drumsamples.Most of these drum sample software packages give you pre-
 
made loops you can use. Most also give you the option toconstruct your own beats using separate, single-hit drumsamples.Lets talk about the loops for a minute. You
may
be able to occasionally find a pre-made pattern inthe package that basically fits your song.But even if a pre-made drum pattern works partly, there areinevitably parts of your song that could use a little bit of  variety. Certain parts may benefit from a change in the bassdrum pattern, for example, or maybe looser hi-hats or someextra snare hits. At any rate the chances of drum samplesoftware containing a loop that has
exactly
what you needfor that situation are very slim.Confronted with this situation you are likely the think something like “I need my drum tracks to sound moreorganic than that”, or perhaps “this loop or that loop won’tcut it because I need the drum part to highlight the vocalrhythms on the third pre-chorus”.Of course these are legitimate concerns as you want yourmusic to sound
alive, not contrived 
. And at this point you may decide that you need to
construct the drum parts yourself 
, hit-by-hit, slice-by-slice, usingsingle-hit drum samples. Admittedly, you’ll probably get a better result this way as you at least have control overspecific cymbal crashes, adding bass drum notes, fills, etc.
 
There is a big problem to this approach however: It takes uphuge amounts of your precious time.If you have been through this before, I don’t need to tell you:putting together “custom” drum tracks using single-hit drumsamples will take up so much of your time that you are likely to compromise your artistic needs in the end anyway. You will put in so many hours, and the tracks will sound betterthan just using factory loops, but you will probably give uprealizing that they will never really, truly sound and
 feel 
likecustom drum tracks that were played by a real person for
your 
song. You would look at how much time you have put in to them,and settle for your cobbled-together tracks because youcouldn’t bear to do such tedious busy work anymore. You wouldn’t even end up with the result you wanted . It wouldonly be closer to that goal than the factory loops -- closer, butno cigar!They say say 
time is money
, which everybody knows is true.It seems like you'd save money painfully cobbling a drumpart together slice-by-slice from a drum pattern /samplesoftware package, but in reality its just not worth the time you'd waste, and the frustration you would feel. As you look at it that way, its obvious that approach wouldreally end up costing you. A much better idea is to take advantage of a recentdevelopment, the appearance of online session drummers.
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