DAN AGOSTO: Hello there. I'm Dan Agosto for Gearwire.Com and today we're going to be talking about sampling, in particular making your own samples. So for this sort of demonstration, I'm going to be using Cakewalk Session Drummer 2 inside of Sonar 6. So what I want to do is I want to take a drum beat, this I basically a drum machine in software form, and it has built-in MIDI files. We can hear one right here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK A MIDI FILE THROUGH SESSION DRUMMER 2 IN CAKEWALK SONAR]

And what I want to do is I want to replace the actual samples that are being used in this file so that they're new, and I want to create something new, and to do that I'm going to be using the good old Shure SM57 dynamic microphone.

All right. So first of all, we need to replace the kick, and I don't want this to sound real. I want this to sound sort of lo-fi and maybe that'll make it interesting, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a little technique I like to call thumping the microphone.

[DAN AGOSTO DEMONSTRATES THUMPING THE MICROPHONE]

Sort of make that kind of sound. As we can see, we have the track armed in Sonar, and we are not clipping, so I'm going to go ahead and record this.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK A MIDI FILE THROUGH SESSION DRUMMER 2 IN CAKEWALK SONAR]

Nope. Look at it. First what I've got to do is tell Session Drummer to just stop playing. All right, try that again.

[DAN AGOSTO RECORDS MICROPHONE THUMP SAMPLE IN CAKEWALK SONAR]

All right. I think that worked pretty well.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MICROPHONE THUMP SAMPLE IN CAKEWALK SONAR]

Yeah. That's pretty much the sound we're looking for. I don't even need to put any EQ on it. You can always mess with your samples in all sorts of ways, but this one I think I'm going to keep raw.

Now, one thing I want to, as you might have seen, is I'm just doing a sort of a slip edit. What I want to do is make these samples have certain qualities of the other samples. Most importantly, as you can see I've loaded in some of the samples down here. This is a kick drum sample right here, and let's zoom in on it. As you can see -- actually, I'll make this take up the whole page. As you can see, this sample starts pretty much right at the beginning, but also the waveform is at zero at the beginning, and the reason we want that because is if it's not at zero, we're going to get a weird kind of digital click. That's not what we're looking for here. You could use that creatively though.

So, what I'm going to do, bring back all my tracks, and here's our kick drum sound, and make it have the same beginning quality of the kick drum that we're replacing, so what I'm going to do is just bring it right up on top of the sound so that it starts right there, and now, as you can see we're pretty close to zero in our sample but we're not quite there. We can see the waveform starts a little above our zero crossing, so what I'm going to do is add a little small fade that's about as small as we can make it. So, what that's going to do is automatically raise the volume from zero up in a very short amount of time and guarantee that at the beginning of the sample we have zero crossing. So let's take a listen to our sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MICROPHONE THUMP SAMPLE]

All right. That's pretty much what we are looking for, and as you can see also at the end, I've done another fadeout so that we don't have any clicks when the sample actually ends. So we're almost done with this. One thing I want to do is do a normalize on it, and what that does is it makes the level of our audio -- it takes the highest level of our audio and finds, you know, how far from a particular setting that we want it and raises up the volume of the entire sample, so I want the loudest sample to hit at -1 dB. So, I'm going to press OK in our normalize window and it'll automatically just raise the level of our sample. As you can see, that waveform is a lot bigger now.

So we're done with that and what I''m going to do is export it, and I want to export it to our Session Drummer's folder so that I know where it is. It's under Session Drummer>Contents>Kits. I'm going to make my own little folder to kind of emulate what we've got here. So, I'm going to make one called "homemade", go into the folder and call it "kick". All right, I'm going to use a sampling rate of 48 kHz and a bit depth of 24 and we're going to mix it down to stereo. Since we're mixing down to 24-bit, there's no need for us to dither so I'm going to leave that off, and export, and our file is exported.

So we can move on. Now, we need to make a snare sound, so what I'm going to do is using this plate that we used as a prop in one of our Crosstalk episodes, I'm going to hit the mic [DAN AGOSTO HITS STYROFOAM PLATE WITH A SHURE SM57] just right on the front.

[DAN AGOSTO CONTINUES HITTING STYROFOAM PLATE WITH A SHURE SM57]

All right. I'm looking at the level right now, we look all right, so I'm going to record that.

[DAN AGOSTO RECORDS SAMPLE FROM A STYROFOAM PLATE HITTING A SHURE SM57]

let's listen to that and see how we like it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK SAMPLE FROM A STYROFOAM PLATE HITTING A SHURE SM57]

All right, so what happened was the plate kind of bounced off and did like a double hit. I don't want that. Try it again.

[DAN AGOSTO RECORDS SAMPLE FROM A STYROFOAM PLATE HITTING A SHURE SM57]

Now that one was a little loud. I'm going to try it again.

[DAN AGOSTO RECORDS SAMPLE FROM A STYROFOAM PLATE HITTING A SHURE SM57]

All right. That was good. All right so I'm happy with that sound, and what I'm going to do is just edit out that first hit that I did because I just kept on rolling and do the same exact thing as I did with the kick. I'll add in the fades, I'm going to edit up the front. This is the most important part, editing up the front of your sample. So, you always want to make sure that you do it right, get right up on the sound and adjust a little bit more, and then add the smallest little fade that you can manage, and as you can see I'm making great use of the zooming features that we can use in a digital audio application such as Sonar. I'll give it a quick listen.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK SAMPLE FROM A STYROFOAM PLATE HITTING A SHURE SM57]

All right. Now we just got to normalize, do the same normalization up to -1 dB, and then export, go to the same folder, name it, done with that. I'm just going to get rid of it, and now onto our hi-hat.

Now for hi-hat, I kind of like a beatboxing stlye. I'm just going to go [DAN AGOSTO IMITATING A HI-HAT SOUND] into a microphone. [DAN AGOSTO IMITATING A HI-HAT SOUND] get to a quick level [DAN AGOSTO IMITATING A HI-HAT SOUND]. All right.

[DAN AGOSTO RECORDING A BEATBOX HI-HAT SOUND]

That's pretty good. Let me see how it sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK A BEATBOX HI-HAT SOUND SAMPLE]

Hmm, now if you're listening on some actual speakers, not your little computer speakers, you might here that there's some low frequency energy there in there like [DAN AGOSTO BLOWING AIR TOWARDS SHURE SM57] kind of like I'm blowing in to the microphone, and that's actually exactly what I'm doing. I don't want that in there, so what I'm going to do is open up just any EQ that you're used to using. I'm going to make a high-pass filter and just move it up. All of the energy in this that we want is up around here, this range. I'm just going to take out everything that we don’t need, and let's see how that sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK A BEATBOX HI-HAT SOUND SAMPLE]

Much better. Do the same editing. It's always important to work in a program that you're used to. I'm very used to this program and just makes everything a lot faster much easier. All right. Right up on there, real quick fade, and the back end as well, throw a quick fade on there, do a quick listen.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK A BEATBOX HI-HAT SOUND SAMPLE]

All right, and that seems loud enough. I don't think I'm going to need to normalize that one. Do an export. I'm going to call this one "hat-cl". The "cl" stands for closed. If it was open, I'd do something like [Dan Agosto imitating an open hi-hat sound] but let's just do this. Since the MIDI file that Session Drummer is playing only uses closed hi-hat, we don't need to worry about that.

All right. So now I'm going to get rid of my EQ. We're just about ready to replace our samples. So I'm going to open up Session Drummer and we'll give another listen to our samples -- the samples that are already there.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK A MIDI FILE THROUGH SESSION DRUMMER 2 WITH DEFAULT SAMPLES]

All right. And so, on this pad we have our kick. I'm going to unload the instrument. I right clicked on there and just going to get rid of it, so now we've got nothing on there and then click load instrument and it automatically opened into our kits folder or it should -- actually it didn't. Contents, kits, homemade. All right, so we're going to add our kick sample to that one. Our snare we got to unload first and load up our snare sound, and also load up our hi-hat.

All right. Now let's listen to the MIDI file played back. I'm going to loop it. We'll listen to the file playback with our new samples.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK A MIDI FILE THROUGH SESSION DRUMMER 2 WITH HIS HOMEMADE SAMPLES]

So kind of interesting, something that I encourage everyone to do is to make their own samples and use them in their music. You don't have to be as lo-fi as I am. You can actually sample your own kick drums, you can make sounds with a guitar or a keyboard and use them in the same way. So thanks for checking out this video.