Find the perfect sample faster.

Drums

Loops

One Shots

MIDI

Sample Packs & Drum Kits

Tired of searching through multiple sample packs or drum kits for the perfect sample?

Do you have thousands of samples that go unused?

Maybe you don't like relying on sample managers' hit-or-miss tagging methods.

Or you simply just want to find the perfect sample faster.

Well now you can work smarter with your own custom sample library categories!

(See also, categorize your virtual instruments or categorize your processing plugins).

Did you know that sound selection is more important than mixing and mastering?

This process is often overlooked and sometimes determines (what I like to call) "mix-potential". It also plays a huge role in a producer's sound and separates an amateur-sounding beat from a high-level, well-produced track.

For example, instead of limiting yourself to only a handful of drum samples in a few sample packs, wouldn't it be nice to quickly audition ALL of the different kicks, claps, hi hats and snares from ALL of your favorite sample packs? Well that's exactly what this method solves. Most of the time, you can find what you're looking for if you know where to look. However, for the sounds in which you can't remember it's location out of the thousands of sample packs you may have, looking in ONE folder eliminates ever wasting time, especially while you're in the room with an artist/songwriter or while the creative juices are flowing.

While this method makes browsing your samples significantly faster, the process of manually organizing one's own sample library is extremely time consuming, especially if you have terabytes of samples. But if tackled a little bit at a time over the years, eventually you can start to sort your own sample library and begin to benefit from this insanely-efficient workflow.

If this sounds like a daunting task, well it is. Luckily, an easy place to start is by categorizing sample packs or drum kits themselves either by genre or by type (as shown in the last image above). Some of the pre-made categories even contain deep sub-categories – helping to further narrow down your choices and filter out irrelevant results.

You may also want to look into a sample manager like Sononym which can help pre-sort audio files which you can then relocate to your custom sample library folder.

Definitely at least give this a try and see if it works for you.

You're one step closer to crafting your next hit song even faster.

Let me know if this workflow has helped you or if you have any other sample library workflows you currently use!

If you find this useful, please consider supporting by repurchasing or donating below 🙏🏼 I’d truly appreciate it. 

Enjoy!