Having recently taken the plunge to learn the inns and outs of creating a sample library/instrument/whatever-you-want-to-call-it for the Decent Sampler, I looked around wondering what I could sample to create a new instrument. The first thing my gaze landed upon were my two djembes, so I got ready to have some fun hitting my drums. I know next to nothing about the creation of these drums – one was a gift from my parents, and is I believe a fibreglass body with a synthetic drum head and a metal ring holding the drum head in place vs the traditional roping. The other is one I stumbled upon in a traveling shop set up in the middle of the mall selling many interesting and random things, advertised to be all hand-made in Indonesia. This second drum has a more traditional wooden body, I’m fairly confident the drum head is animal hide (whether it is the traditional goat skin I couldn’t say though), and the traditional roping holding the drum head in place. Both drums are fairly similar in size but have different sound from their different shapes and materials.

I recorded 6 different types of drum hits with 2 velocity layers and 4 round robins in each velocity layer for each drum hit. I’m always a fan of using a dynamic mic to close mic drums, so I used my SM58 through an ART Tube MP preamp for a little bit of that nice tubey warmth and goodness.

I felt that the thing to do was to keep this instrument pretty simple, so the only extra thing I included is a knob to control the wet/dry mix of a convolution reverb, which can be controlled via the mod wheel.

Hopefully this is something that other people can enjoy and get some use out of. If so, happy composing!

Contributors

Ryan Noakes

Recorded myself playing 6 different drum hits on the 2 djembes and made the DecentSampler instrument.