I remember a time when I was in college and I wanted to record a few of my songs. I didn’t have a lot of recording gear, and I didn’t have any good drum sounds in my studio setup. I wasn’t about to drop hundreds of dollars on a drum machine–I was a college student, after all, and I was still buying ramen noodles because they were ten cents a package. So I figured it was about time I stocked up on some drum loops.
Scouring the Internet, I looked for what my options were. To my surprise, many drum loop CDs cost hundreds of dollars. Not only that, I could only guess at what I would be getting because they didn’t provide much as far as audio samples went. Drum loops are short, so most “audio samples” would last as long as the loop itself! No wonder they weren’t eager to reveal too much…
Finally, I settled on a CD that cost about a hundred bucks and probably had about a hundred loops on it
. I pulled out my nearly-empty pockets, scraped together what little cash I had, and bought the CD.
Looking back, I really wish that DrumTracks.com had existed back then. Here’s why:
100 loops doesn’t equal 100 songs
It seemed like a pretty good deal: a hundred bucks for a hundred drum loops. A dollar per loop is a pretty sweet deal, right? The problem was that I wasn’t really able to make a different song out of each loop. I wanted different drum beats for different song sections, plus fills and other variations. The loops on the CD were split into groups–slightly different version of the same drum beat with different cymbals or fills. When all was said and done, I needed to use about five of the drum loops for any given song. Unless I wanted to write a bunch of tunes over the same exact drum track, I could only squeeze a handful of songs out of a CD with a hundred loops.
I paid for loops I’d never use
I’d like to think I’m a pretty creative guy, but inspiration can really hit a wall when you’re trying to write songs based on drum loops that are very similar in style and tempo. Since most loop CDs stick to a certain genre, that meant the collection I bought didn’t have a lot going for it as far as musical variation goes. So I ended up never even using a bunch of the drum loops, and probably only got a couple songs out of my $100 investment. (And that investment was only in the drums!) It seems inefficient to pay for drum loops I’ll never use. What’s the point?
Piecing together loops just doesn’t sound like a real song
In the end, even the songs I did make from the drum loop CD didn’t sound too much like a real drummer was playing the part. The options are so limited–a few bars of this pattern, a few bars of that, maybe a fill or two that I would have to re-use over and over. With DrumTracks.com, the options are both natural sounding and cost-efficient. You’ve got the full form of a song played continuously by a real player, but it’s edited to a click so that you can cut and paste to loop certain sections if you need to. There are lots of fills and variations to choose from in a single drum track, and it costs a heck of a lot less than a collection of drum loops!
If you want to save some cash and get some awesome full-length drum tracks played by real drummers, sign up for a free account today!
Tags: buy drum beats, buy loops, buy sample cds, create drum beats, drum beats, drum loops, drum samples, Drum tracks, loops, natural sounding drums