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Using uncompressed drum samples can be very unappealing to new music producers and beat makers, but anybody who has a real love for audio and an unbridled admiration of music and sounds that are true to their source will venture into the compression-less world sooner or later. Compression is basically the process of increasing the volume of the quiet parts of a song, piece of music or drum sound. It has been around since at least the 60s, possibly earlier.

Compression on drum samples can come into your workflow at two stages. The first is the drum sample selection process. This is where you’ll find the samples that were appropriately compressed by the library manufacturer, and hopefully not overly compressed. If you’re finding that a lot of your samples are ‘banging’ and very loud before even coming into your song, you’re probably dealing with samples that have had all the life sucked out of them already.

The second point at which compression will play apart is the final mixing process. This is where you would electively apply some compression using software or hardware audio compressors on drum samples or slight applications to soft instruments like the piano. The main creative difference here is that you are not subject to the over-compression used by many sound editors. Your decisions from here are truly coming from you.

Just about every song in the top 40 these days has a great drum samples pattern that has effective compression that cuts through the mix, as this is vital for radio-viable songs in this modern age. While compression is often frowned upon by a lot of audiophiles, it has plenty of creative uses, even in electronic music. For instance, using a chained-in effect to achieve a ‘ducking’ sound like in dance music is quite popular.

If you’ve just picked out some drum samples that absolutely love each other and can’t afford to even let one of them go, but have noticed gross over-compression on one or more, there may be some things you can do. You can introduce some feeling and life back into these sounds using audio editors. There are many audio editors available today, including free version from Audacity and others, so download one if you don’t have one yet. One thing you can do sonically to liven up any sample is to couple it with another sample that is untouched and still retains many of its original characteristics. Another process to go through is trying to crop and apply some filters to add some creative noise back into the sound.

One of a few compression techniques for drum samples is the NY compression effect. In essence, it’s achieved by combining an original sample with the same sample heavily compressed. Having both allows the volume to be maximized while the dynamics are not totally diminished.

If you’re after some great-sounding hip hop drum samples or simply want to know how to make hip hop beats, just remember that you shouldn’t settle for second best!