My vibe, like many of you, is to download as much as I can from the Net. The biggest tip I can give is to be creative from where you sample from.

For instance, your average guy looking for drum samples would go to some run of the mill sampling CD or website like samplearena.com or samplenet. The problem, is... most of these loops and samples have gone round the block more times than Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and it's not easy to get excited about them.

Recently, I've discovered that with a bit of imagination you can come up with some pretty cool drum sounds, if only you go beyond the usual crud sample libraries that everyone by now has used and abused at some point.

Here's a concrete example from my recent experiences....

about a month ago I was making up some drum sounds for a cover song and I needed a cool 4/4 intro. I sat back and thought for a second if there were any songs I could think of with a cool sounding 4/4beat that I could sample and then chop up. In the end I went for the intro from ZZ Tops sharp dressed man- perhaps one of the most memorable 4/4 drum intros of all time! Then I wanted a cool hi hat sound. I thought about this too and in the end decided to sample Mich Michell's hi hats as played in the intro for Voodoo Chile. Another thing I wanted was a really hard ass kicking crash. So, did I screw around with some crud sample CD? No, I went straight for the jugular and sampled a Jon Bonham (Led Zep) drum solo, zooming in on his crash sounds and helping myself to some real kick ass cymbals.

In the end I took all of this stuff... chopped it up, pasted it together, changed the tempo, added a few fills and some reverb to make it sound like it was all in the same room. The result was, I think... a pretty cool drum track.

Optinone talks about tweaking everything in Wavlab and says that's where the magic happens. For me, there is no need to worry about time consuming tweaking- I leave the tweaking to Jon Bonhams drum engineer (or whoever it may be I'm sampling from). As, I say, the only thing I ever need to tweak is reverb so that the parts that make up my kits sound like they're from the same kit instead of having half my kit in the Albert Hall and the other half in some studio.

If anybody wants to come forward and say that my drums sound thin or tinny or something then they are basically slagging some of the best drummers in the history of popular music, so screw them.

As for copyright? Well, by the time you've chopped it, changed the tempo, added your own fills, added reverb and submerged it in your own music then there's no way on Earth anyone could ever pin you down for it- unless they have ears like Spock!

[This message has been edited by Equalizer (edited 04-22-2002).]