Disclaimer: This thread is meant to be about the creative process in selecting samples and adding them to your project, not about how you technically add samples to your project.
Hi Folks,
I am often struggling with adding hundreds of sounds into my project and end up with being totally unhappy and overwhelmed with the selection, because nothing properly fits and I am having a hard time to find the right sample at the right time.
After some time, nothing is sorted anymore, here baselines, there drum loops, then 2 vocals and another 2 baseline loops
So I was wondering how you approach in filling your fresh DT2 project with samples?
I mostly do it like this:
For starters I add 4-5 samples of each drum, that I would like to have, e.g. 4kick, 5Snare, 4OH, 5CH and so on.
Afterwards I add one shots and loops.
But after starting to make music with it, everything gets crazy, new samples being added, because e.g. of missing the right tom or vocal at a momentā¦
How is your approach?
Do you add sample by sample as you need them?
Do you fill all banks before you even start?
And what are your kinds of sound, that you add every time?
Do you start with loops or one shots?
Do you do all your projects with one sample only?
Which drum sounds do you add every time to have a nice drum kit?
Hope, this make sense to you.
My entire sample collection is pretty heavily curated, so it only takes up about 800MB right now. This is drums, loops, synth samples, found sounds, everything. I also name everything something nice and easy, aka Kick01.wav, Kick02.wav, Bass23.wav, Breakbeat045.wav, etc.
By doing all the work ahead of time to get rid of samples I know FOR SURE Iām never going to use from my collection, plus naming everything nice and simple in advance, it makes it ten times easier to find what I need when Iām actually in the writing phase. Also keeping my personal sample library small means I can just load everything onto pretty much all my devices as soon as I get them. Then Iām not trying to decide which samples to load when writing either, theyāre all onboard already and set to go. Obviously this depends on what gear youāre using and how much memory it has, but with the DT2ās huge storage onboard itās a non-issue in this case.
Bit by bit, I almost never load whole sets of samples into a project, I pick them out on a track by track basis, often with FUNC+YES in the SRC picker view
Then again I create one project per track and never go back to it, if I was making a project for a live set, that would be totally different.
I mostly use a project to tinker around.
I write a 4-8 bar loops and remix those from one pattern to the other over and over until I have a nice pattern that I like to arrange or until I have enough patterns for a live set.
I usually donāt write whole tracks within the Digitakt.
BANK A: Mostly everything just thrown in there
BANK B: For Breaks
BANK C: For Chords
BANK D: For Drums, mostly oneshots
BANK E, F: For mostly textures and vocals
BANK G: For single cycles and wavetables
BANK H: For the really weird stuff
It can change from project to project, but Bank B C D are always the ones mentioned.
