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How to Make Huge Drops in Music Production
A lot of EDM producers want o know how to make huge drops for their songs. Hell, producers of most genres, from lo-fi hip hop to pure pop, would love to know how to make huge drops.
Now, there's a lot that goes into a great drop, from your choice of sounds to the pacing of the instruments. And that's not what this tip is about. It assumes you've pretty much got your drop there, but you just can get everything to sit together perfectly.
Not like on your favorite tracks.
So this quick tip for how to get huge drops is a silver bullet if you're having trouble getting your drop to sit right in terms of timing.
Check out the video below to see this tip in action.
How to make huge drops by exporting to audio
As the video shows, you can try exporting the drop portion of your tracks to an audio file. If you export your tracks to audio files, you can gain a lot more precise control over the timing of your audio.
For example, while you're synth sound may be perfect for the rest of the beat, it just evolves a little too slowly for pacing of the drop. Well, Reason, like most DAWs, includes powerful audio stretching features. By stretching out the files just a bit, you can nudge the elements into place for a tight, huge drop.
Pro tip: don't forget to stretch the length of drum hit!
Serato Sample Review: My New Favorite Sampler
Serato Sample Review: Intro
If you're reading this Serato Sample Review, you probably want me to cut straight to the chase and tell you what it think. So here it is: Serato Sample is probably the best VST sampler that I've found for a Reason yet. At least for doing sample-based hip hop.
Basically, if you want to do sample based music this thing is a thousand times better than what's built into Reason. It blows the NN-XT and Dr. Rex out of the water. Then evaporates the water. It's pretty much on par with the sampler in Maschine, which is probably the best around. It not quite as intuitive as the Maschine sampler, though, in part because it doesn't integrate a nifty piece of hardware nearly as well.
But Serato Sample basically does everything you'd want it to do a super powerful fast easy to work with and it sounds great.
And it can create scratching sounds too! Who doesn't want a scratched vinyl sound.
Second, this article may include affiliate links which generate a commission for clicking through them. However, this does not bias my opinion.
Serato Sample Review: Features
So let's look into it's features really quickly and we'll go from there. You can take just a basic drum beat and quickly I add sample points here and play them in a slightly different rhythm. So you can keep the feel of the loop but play it more intuitively. This also works great with sampled instruments.
Serato Sample automatically detects the sample's key and bpm, which makes it really easy to get samples working with your song. And you can chose whether to have it synched to your BPM. You can also have it quickly play twice as fast or half as fast. And you can shift the key easily with a sound processing engine that sounds great.
If you use it, you'll notice it's color coded to sort of demonstrate where the dynamics of a sample are, in case you're looking for something in particular. This can be really helpful you really quickly find something bits and pieces in more complex, longer samples
It's got four different modes so you can the first one will be key shift. You place a sample marker, then hit a key on your keyboard it it automatically gets mapped. So your second key you will place the sample marker there and your third key, etc. This is how sampling should be in 2080. So super easy to chop and work with samples
You can also set it to random and this will just give you a bunch of random sample points and who knows what will get. This is a great creativity boost, because you can start setting sample points randomly, save the ones you like, and clear all the rest.
And then another cool one is the find samples mode. I don't know what algorithm it might use (maybe transient detection), but it does find really usable samples. So now let's play.
There is also the option of playing the samples in mono where each sample retriggers, or poly, where the samples stack.
And if you want a new school sound, you can pitch shifts any sample so it's playing the same sample but in a different key and the great thing is it doesn't mess with the speed of the signal sample continues to play with the same rhythm. It just changes the pitch and not all samplers do that. So that's really helpful as well. A
And then if you don't like where the sample point is let's just change it to their you can play. Well if we go into poly we can play chords.
It's super cool.
You can reverse individual samples. Most of the filters and the attacks and releases and so I'll show you one other thing you can adjust for just one sample. You can times stretch or pitch shift key shift individual samples to make them fit with the vibe of the song and so on this sample here and hear it.
Of and so this is just a super intuitive fast way to start sampling really effectively and you can turn all of your old loops into a completely new creations. Now I'm a big fan. Having read this review, you can buy Sample on their website.
Serato Sample Review: What's Wrong
Unfortunately, Serato Sample doesn't work perfectly with Reason (it may or may not be better integrated with other DAWs - in fact I'd bet it is). I think this is mostly owing to the way that Reason handles it's files and the relative newness of VSTs to the Reason environment.
The main problem is you can find a sample in your Reason browser that you like, but then you can't directly drag and drop it into Serato Sample. And Serato Sample doesn't preview the sound before you load it. So this can make browsing for samples a little tedious and adds an extra layer of work to get things right.
Serato Sample Review: Conclusion
You should know about it. If you're into a sample based hip hop are plenty of other genres as well. Thanks so much and enjoy watching and if you enjoy that feature and want to learn more about reason please be sure to subscribe. Thanks.