Sample processing tutorials

In this new section, we’re diving into the art of making samples your own! Get ready to explore how recycling and processing breakbeats drum loops & sounds with your software or hardware sampler can unlock your creativity. We’re kicking things off with breakbeat processing—let’s get started and have fun!

Note: the following techniques can be used on breakbeats as well as drum loops to individualize them. Provided that the source samples offer enough scope for processing! This entire tutorial focuses on processing and layering sliced drum loops using only samplers, as well as volume, pitch, filter, and envelope controllers.

With many samplers, it’s also necessary to set ping-pong loops for the tails of the slices, not only to close gaps, but primarily to have more room for creatively editing drum pitch and drum envelope.

Slicing, global drum pitch, and drum envelope editing.

Slice the break into its individual slices and pitch them globally up or down – simply to discover whether you prefer the drums at their original pitch, a higher pitch, or a lower one. Think of it this way: Each pitch reveals a new drum sound, and some drum styles, especially modern d’n’b drums, even require drum sounds at a higher pitch or short envelopes as a start point!

If you choose a lower drum pitch at higher tempos, which results in lengthened slices, you’ll usually need to adjust the drum amp envelope to match the tempo.

In general, it’s crucial to start shaping the drums using only global pitch and amp envelope settings to maintain the groove. Especially if you’re new to this, experiment with global pitches first, rather than assigning individual pitch and level values to drum slices.

However, you can also try different pitch adjustments for individual slices to see if other configurations work better, allowing for further customization of a breakbeat.

Since the drums (image above) are tuned down – 5 semitones below 0 – the amp envelopes of the drum slices were shortened using the Decay, Sustain, and Release parameters to prevent the tails of individual slices from overlapping excessively during playback. This shortening also gives the low-tuned drums a punchier sound!

Another way to make drums like kicks and snares punchier is to use a drum pitch envelope with very short decay times and positive pitch envelope amount values. This creates a quick, transient pitch modulation at the start of the kick and snare drums.

To start of setting pitch envelopes up, set all the envelope sliders to 0 and shape the attack solely using the Envelope Decay and Pitch Envelope Amount parameters.

When pitching up low-tuned drums, envelope adjustments are often unnecessary, as the decay of the drums naturally shortens due to upward pitching. Nevertheless, envelope shaping may still need to be applied in some cases, depending on how you want the pitched-up drums to sound.

Globally processing drum slice envelopes also has the side effect of evenly removing or reducing spatial characteristics and reverb tails from the recording, depending on the settings of the global amp envelope for the slices.

Audio examples: global drum pitch & global drum envelope manipulation.

1. Source breakbeat

2. Source Breakbeat -5 semitones

4. Source Breakbeat: -5 semitones with drum envelope settings 2.

5. Source Breakbeat: -5 semitones with drum envelope settings 3.

Examples drum envelope settings:


Layering

Achieving a cohesive mix or layered mix becomes easier if you first convert breakbeats to mono or align their stereo image and room size of the recordings before combining them. One of the main causes of inconsistent sound in custom breakbeat production is the varying stereo widths of the original breakbeat recordings or the differing spatial characteristics (recording location real or artificial) of the drum recordings.

Plugins that adjust stereo width, remove reverb tails, and minimize room ambience in recordings are ideal for resolving these issues.

To ensure the layers blend well together once the spatial alignment is resolved, aim to balance their levels so that all layers are perceived (when monitoring with headphones) as coming from the same proximity. If, after a good blending, one of the two layers still doesn’t sit quite right in the stereo image, simply readjust the stereo width of the respective layer.

Examples: Adjusting room sizes and proximity (levels)

If you’re new to layering, comparing drum body sizes—visible as dark, hollowed-out areas in the waveforms (Image below)—can help determine whether the layers are well mixed. Do not base your comparison on drum peaks or transients!

Typically, the best mix, is achieved when the drum body sizes are similar.

However, it depends on whether you want to achieve a 50/50 blend or have one layer complement the other in terms of tone, for example, in a 30/70 mix. In the latter case, the breakbeat layers merge better when their reverb tails or spatial characteristics are “dried out” using the aforementioned tools or shortened drum envelopes.

To adjust the tonality of the different layers, simply apply a low-cut or high-cut filter to one or both breakbeat layers, depending on which layer you want to serve as the top loop, to shape the final tonality and energy of the layer mix.

Examples: Drum body sizes

1. The drums in the breakbeats to be layered do not have the same body size.

2. Adjusted drum body size by increasing the volume of breakbeat layer 2.


Replacing or reinforcing kick drums.

When replacing drums in breakbeat recordings, convolution reverbs are particularly effective. For instance, you can use the snare or kick from the original breakbeat as an impulse response to shape a replacement bass drum or snare drum that matches the recording’s environment.

When replacing a kick completely with another kick or synth bass drum, always try adjusting the selected drum’s pitch, envelopes, and filtering first—by making it darker or brighter—to see if you’ve already found the right kick. In many cases, it’s often the tonality that causes a selected replacement drum to sound like it doesn’t belong to the kit!

Once you’ve found a good setting that worked for the adjustment, you can try other drum samples using those settings. You might come across one that works even better.

For reinforcement, if the kicks in the breakbeat are too small and you want them to be bigger, you can create a filtered kick layer to reinforce them. To achieve this, isolate the kick slices from the break, pitch them down by up to -12 semitones, and darken them using a low-pass (LP) or band-pass (BP) filter by lowering the frequency and increasing the resonance if low-end frequencies are needed in the kick layer as well.”

The goal is to create a muffled tonality ( Example: Audio Clip 3 ) that can be layered beneath the kicks in the breakbeat, making it louder and boomier with a low-pass filter or tighter with a band-pass filter.

Audio examples: kick drum reinforcing

1. Source Breakbeat

2. Isolated kick from the source breakbeat to create the layer.

3. Isolated kick pitched -12 semitones and darkened with a bandpass filter.

4. Filtered kick layer (3) mixed with the source breakbeat (1).


Effecting with sound destruction

For the best results, apply effects to individual drum parts rather than the full mix. This allows precise control, even with heavy distortions.

One approach is to heavily distort a breakbeat, slice it again, and reshape it using drum envelopes to restore its form. Start with destruction plugin presets set to dry, then slowly add wet mix, aiming for subtle drum coloration—less is often more.

Experiment with how distortion reacts to short vs. long drum envelopes for various coloration results.

If hi-hats or cymbals dominate after distortion, lower their levels to balance with the kick and snare. Similarly, adjust kick or snare levels if one stands out too much.

Even if pick a custom drum loop, listen carefully to check if the hi-hats are still too loud. When it comes to the mix balance between the kick and snare, there’s not much that can go wrong, but with the volume of hi-hats and cymbals, you need to be very precise. Often, they need to be mixed quieter than you might expect.

Therefore, pay attention to drum loops mixdowns to ensure everything sounds like it’s coming from the same distance.

To achieve good volume relationships for the drums in a mixdown, it’s helpful to use a drum mix that sounds great to you as a reference. You can do this by examining the waveform of the reference drum mix and adjusting the levels of your selected drum kit so that the drum body sizes in your waveform view match those of the reference.

With your drum samples from your BHK packs, this works pretty well without much extra effort to make them fit together—aside from some leveling, drum pitch adjustments, and envelope editing to finalize the drum sound to your taste.

One more tip: what cannot be fixed with a pitch correction might be adjusted with a different drum envelope or filter setting. But the reverse is also true. In general, it’s important to experiment a lot with drum levels, drum pitch, and drum envelopes, as these are the key parameters for a good drum mixdown.

Never give up; the solution is always somewhere between adjusting the drum volume, drum pitch, drum envelope adjustments, and static filter cutoff & resonance settings when reinforcing or layering, to make it work.

Audio Examples: Effecting with destructions

1. Source Breakbeat

2. Heavy Distortion applied : The hi-hats pop out too much, making the distortion sound overly noisy.

3. Now the distortion is feeded with reduced hi-hat levels: The hi-hats blend harmoniously with the proximity of the kick and snare, making the distortion less chaotic and noisy.

4. Distortion feeded with shortened drum slice decay time.


Custom breaks & drum Loops.

When drum samples are cut from different breakbeats or drum loops to create a new one, it’s important, alongside spatiality and stereo width, to ensure that the energy and tonal balance of the selected drums are well-matched. Simply use filters to balance the frequencies of the drums.

Low-end rumbling present in snares, hi-hats, and cymbals can be easily controlled with static HP or BP filters. Hi-hat and cymbal noises on kicks and snares, on the other hand, can be removed with static LP filters. If something becomes too quiet due to the filter settings, simply apply a drum volume correction!

In the following examples, you will hear the extracted drum parts from different drum loops, along with an explanation of what was edited. These parts, when played together, form a new drum loop.

Audio Examples: Isolating, Editing & Mixing Drums

Kick drum slices / pitch -12 semitones, bandpass filtering & envelope editing:

Kick drum source drum loop:

Snare drum slices / pitch +9 semitones, Bandpass filtering & envelope editing:

Snare drum source drum loop:

Snare drum layer slice / pitch -11 semitones & envelope editing:

Snare drum layer source drum loop:

All drum slices / pitch -3 semitones, highpass filtering & envelope editing

Source drum loop

All isolated and edited drum parts mixed:


Choppy tails and filling gaps

When pitching a sliced drum loop higher, gaps may appear between slices, creating a choppy sound. To fix this, layering can help. Duplicate the loop, pitch it until the gaps disappear, and adjust filters, envelopes, and volume to match the original loop.

Focus on creating a ghost layer with mid-to-high frequencies using band-pass or high-pass filtering, blending it subtly beneath the choppy loop. Alternatively, shorten slice decay, soften the attack, and adjust sustain/release for smoother tails.

Experiment with filter types and settings to blend layers seamlessly. Fine-tune frequency, resonance, levels, and envelopes until the mix sounds cohesive. Balance is key; tonality can be adjusted later.

For the choppy-sounding audio example (Layer 1), the slices were further shortened after being pitch-shifted to demonstrate what can still be achieved in an extreme example.

Source Breakbeat:

Layer 1: Source breakbeat pitched up +4 semitones with extremely chopped drum tails:

Layer 2: Source breakbeat pitched down -5 semitones, band-pass filtered, with shortened drum decay times:

Layer 1 & Layer 2 mixed:


Last note:

It is advisable to perform all these processes using headphones, as they require precision work, and our ears find it harder to accurately judge proximity, room size, and stereo width through speakers.

“Furthermore, especially if you’re new to this, we encourage you to use the source materials for practice by attempting to replicate the processes in your sampler. You can download all drum loops directly from the players by right-clicking and selecting ‘Save Audio’ in 16-bit 44.1 Flac format.

We hope that this tutorial has given you some inspiration on how you can creatively create individual breaks and drum loops from your breakbeat and drum loop collection, especially from your bhk sample packs.

More will follow soon!

www.bhksamples.com