Lucas Fournier Indie Folk Cymbals

5+ years of producing intimate, vulnerable indie folk, pop & singer-songwriter music has taught me that getting drums—and specifically cymbals—to sound realistic is a nightmare...

...so I spent $1,387 buying top-quality cymbals for my home studio because I got sick of the bland & unrealistic hat, ride, and crash sounds from my favourite drum VSTs and sample packs.

Here's the issue: most drum sample packs are focused on drag-and-drop loops, beats, and fills, and the one-shots are just an afterthought. This becomes such a pain when you want full control over your drum parts.

The solution? This sample pack, of course! This is a sample pack with 230 one-shots (plus a handful of loops for good measure): I hit my crash, ride, and hat pretty much every way possible with sticks, rods, and mallets to capture an incredible amount of nuance and variety in performance. Every type of hit is recorded at 4-6 different velocities, so instead of trying to make a hi-hat pattern out of a single sample and adjusting the volume to give the illusion of harder and softer hits, you can actually mix and match dozens of samples of the same cymbal hit in slightly different ways to create a truly authentic performance.

Using this sample pack together with my favourite drum VSTs & samples for kicks/toms/snares has given me by far the most realistic drum sounds I've ever created.

You can try to achieve this kind of nuance with a random assortment of samples you found on Splice...or you can use a sample pack that was specifically made for this EXACT purpose! Your choice ;)

Technical specs:

Hat: Sabian Paragon 13"
Ride: Sabian 20" Stratus
Crash: Sabian AAX 16"

Microphone: Universal Audio Sphere DLX (stereo mode)

Interface: Universal Audio Apollo Twin

Files: Stereo WAVs, 24 bit depth, 48kHz sample rate