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S1E05 – Buying Sounds, Saving Money

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Purchasing the right sounds is important when starting to produce music.

In this episode I talk to you about various things to think about when it comes to purchasing sounds like:

  • What to Look for in Sounds
  • What Types of Sounds Should you Buy
  • What Kind of Sounds Should a Producer Have

When I’m looking to purchase a sound kit, I’m looking for Quality and Variety.

These two criteria are essential to being creative as a producer, and having a solid foundation to work off of.

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Transcript

S1E05 – Buying Sounds, Saving Money

  1. Hey, this is Gratuitous. Welcome to Music Production Made Simple, the show that
  2. focuses on best practices about music production, which is based on FL Studio.
  3. If you're wanting to become the best producer you can be, subscribe and listen
  4. weekly. You can also check out my courses, which teach you the principles and basics
  5. of music production. They'll get you up and running quickly.
  6. In addition, I also have books on Amazon and tons of music on Spotify.
  7. Always feel free to hit me up at Hi at it'sgratuitous.com.
  8. So let's get into the episode.
  9. Okay, welcome back to another episode.
  10. This is episode number five. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about buying
  11. sounds as a producer, okay? So how to buy the right sounds and save money while
  12. doing so, what to look for in sounds, what type of sounds should you buy, and what
  13. kind of sounds should you have as a producer, okay?
  14. So I think the first thing that we have to talk about is the different types of
  15. sounds that we have available.
  16. So we have one shot sounds and we have instruments.
  17. So instruments are what we use to create melodies.
  18. These can be things like serum, silent one, harmor, and FL Studio calls these
  19. generators, okay? It's what we use to create the melodies, and they're like in
  20. perfect pitch, which I'll talk about later.
  21. I'd also classify sampling underneath the instruments umbrella category here.
  22. Again, sampling is when you take a piece of audio with like the melody, you chop it
  23. up and create your own arrangement out of it.
  24. Now, one shot sounds are like our kicks, claps, hi hats, different types of
  25. percussion elements to build our drum loops, as well as one shot sound effects as
  26. well. One thing you have to be very, very careful of is not to buy construction
  27. kits, okay? And what construction kits are it's like these people are creating loops
  28. typically for you to use royalty free, and you can add these loops into your track.
  29. But really, what they're doing is like they're creating a song, breaking out the
  30. stems, and you can use these stems essentially as loops within your song.
  31. you have to be careful because, as a producer, most of the time you are wanting to
  32. use these one-shot sounds, not construction kits, okay.
  33. And typically they're priced about the same.
  34. Sometimes construction kits are even sometimes a little bit a little bit more
  35. expensive. So just be very very, careful when you're purchasing sounds that they're
  36. not construction kits. I personally like the one-shot sounds where I can create my
  37. own drum loop from scratch. Okay.
  38. So let's move into what are we producers looking for in our sounds, okay?
  39. So again, this is from my opinion, my perspective, but I'm looking at quality and
  40. variety. Okay, those are the two main factors.
  41. Now, in terms of quality, when it comes to the generators, again, your instruments
  42. and your one-shot sounds, it's a little bit different, okay.
  43. So, with the generators, typically these VSTs, these instruments are perfect pitch,
  44. which is awesome. Okay, so they're mathematical, so everything is in tune when you
  45. go from one VST to the next. If you play A, you're playing A or like A4, for
  46. example, right? A4 on one VST would be like the same A4 on another VST, you know, if
  47. you're not touching like D tune and stuff like that.
  48. But if you're using like a recording as an instrument, and this is something that I
  49. have done in my later years, so I've actually created a course, it's called organic
  50. beats, or it's actually called creating organic beats.
  51. And so, what I do with you is I take a single guitar note and I actually record it
  52. with you. We then bring that guitar note into FL Studio and I create a whole
  53. composition out of that single guitar note.
  54. I create tons of different instruments just through my effects and different you
  55. know kind of tweaks and stuff like that.
  56. But the reason why I want to tell you that is because if you are using a single
  57. guitar note that you've recorded, you have to be careful because it might not be in
  58. perfect pitch. Okay, so now if you want to use that single guitar note, in
  59. conjunction with these VSTs, these generators, which are perfect pitch, it's gonna
  60. be really, really hard for you to kind of work with both of them, okay.
  61. Now, for quality in terms of our one-shot sounds, you know, you're just looking for
  62. wave and not MP3, okay. MP3 is lossy, which means that the actual data within the
  63. actual sound itself frequencies have been removed., so the fidelity is not there
  64. But in my opinion, what you're looking for is 16 bit 44.1 wave, okay.
  65. That's like that's perfect. That's awesome quality, that's CD standard, that's what
  66. we've been listening to for years.
  67. but you know, the enthusiast crowd, they might even want higher quality, like 24 bit
  68. 48k, okay. again, at the end of the day, music gets released as MP3s, you know,
  69. streaming platforms back in the day when we used to download single songs from like
  70. iTunes and stuff like that for 99 cents.
  71. You're getting it as like a 256 AAC or MP3, you know.
  72. So, in my opinion, the fidelity at 16-bit 44.1 is great.
  73. If you want to set that argument of, oh well, 24 bit 48k is way higher quality.
  74. At the end of the day, what are people listening to your music on, anyways?
  75. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is variety.
  76. Okay, so the key to your sound selection as you are purchasing your sounds,
  77. especially when you're starting up, because you have to be careful, you don't want
  78. to fall into what I call gear lust and just purchasing all these sounds just for the
  79. sake of having sounds. But you want variety, okay?
  80. So with our instruments, you want to make sure that you have some pianos, you want
  81. to make sure you have guitars, synths, bass, and various other kind of unique
  82. instruments that there's tons of VSTs out there that allow you to do stuff.
  83. For example, if you want like exilophones or you know, stuff like that.
  84. That's the key. You want to have variety, okay?
  85. with your one shot sounds, it's very, very important for you to have a lot of
  86. variety here too, such as toms, shakers, tambourines, bongos, long-tailed kicks,
  87. short-tailed kicks, punchy kicks, 808s.
  88. you You know know., So that's what I'm trying to get across to you is you want
  89. variety, okay? Because what we can do is we can always affect these sounds later
  90. with. EQ and various other effects
  91. but it's important to have a high quality foundation because then it's really easy
  92. to be creative with our variety, okay?
  93. So it's hard to create a high quality beat out of low quality sounds, okay?
  94. And the key is versatility in our sounds.
  95. That's the key to be creative as a producer.
  96. So let's talk about how many sounds should a producer purchase.
  97. Now get this. I've been producing music for about 10 years now, and my personal drum
  98. kit folder, my one-shot sounds, is less than five gigabytes.
  99. Okay. You read on like forums and like Reddit and stuff like that, and people are
  100. like, I have a hundred gigabyte folder of my sounds.
  101. And it's just like, I'm gonna explain why my folder is so small, okay.
  102. So, first of all, I want to say that I actually have tons of versatility in my sound
  103. kits, okay, because over my years, I have just purchased high quality sounds that
  104. also had a lot of variety in them.
  105. Another benefit of this is it's super minimal.
  106. Okay, so it's like I don't have tons of sounds, I don't get confused where sounds
  107. are. I know exactly where my different types of sounds are.
  108. In addition, it's really, really light to carry around.
  109. Like I don't need to, you know, always have one specific hard drive just for my
  110. sounds. It's just five gigabytes of sounds is unreal.
  111. So that's just something really interesting for you guys to think about.
  112. Okay. So I have high quality sounds, you know, I have tons of variety, and I have
  113. less than five gigabytes of my one-shot drums, claps, snares, hi-hats, and various
  114. other percussion elements. Okay, so let's talk about where to buy your sounds from.
  115. Okay. So when I first started producing, I didn't have these online services, you
  116. know, such as like splice and stuff like that, which I'll talk about in a second.
  117. Now I started producing before these online services started up where you can kind
  118. of pay per sound. I've always bought my sound kits like as a whole, and I kind of
  119. liked always going through them after I purchased them.
  120. And I haven't purchased a sound kit in over five years, okay.
  121. So I feel I have enough sounds to not feel stale in my own productions, allowing my
  122. music to still have a different sound and stuff like that.
  123. So, again, to talk about like that gearlust thing, okay.
  124. You don't need tons of sounds, you need quality and variety.
  125. Okay, that's the key. Now, services like Splice have come up in recent years, and
  126. you can pay per sound. So, you know, it allows you to pay for what you use.
  127. It's a pretty cool business model.
  128. it's subscription-based, so you pay like per month, you get like credits or whatever
  129. to use towards per sound, and each sound is like one credit or however they price
  130. it. Splice's platform also allows you to like save revisions of songs and
  131. collaborate with artists. So, as a whole, their website and the software that they
  132. provide is very, very powerful.
  133. But since I'm just like a solo producer and artist, I prefer just like a cloud
  134. service like Dropbox just to manage all my stuff.
  135. I actually never even tried Splice until I created this episode.
  136. You know, I wanted to try it before I even talked on the company, but you know, I
  137. tried it out. I just tried like the 14-day trial that they have.
  138. and it you know, it was pretty cool.
  139. You know, they have extremely high quality sounds, you get to pick what you want.
  140. It's a pretty cool model. So with Splice, just make sure to back up your sounds,
  141. like the ones that you download before canceling your subscription.
  142. Okay. I'll just talk quickly about some of them, some of like my favorite sound kit
  143. companies. I actually used to sell sound kits.
  144. I used to run the website, soundpackflyer.com.
  145. I was able to sell sounds for like Anno Domini Beats, Beat Butcher, exclusive audio,
  146. sounds in HD, and stuff like that.
  147. recently I closed down that website to focus more time on my own brand, creating
  148. courses, now this podcast and stuff like that.
  149. but some of my favorite companies over the years of when I did purchase sounds, was
  150. exclusive audio, extremely, extremely high quality sounds, tons of versatility in
  151. the sounds. one sound kit to check out from them is called Organic Beats.
  152. That's different than my course called Creating Organic Beats.
  153. Their sound kit is actually called organic beats, okay.
  154. Sounds and HD is a really cool company.
  155. if you want really, really high quality dance sounds, Vengeance Sample Packs is now
  156. on reef.com. That's where you can find the Nexus2 VST as well.
  157. very, very high quality sounds from Vengeance as well.
  158. Okay. So I just want to talk about how to organize your drum kits and how I have
  159. approached it in later years. So, how I approach it is I create a sounds kit folder.
  160. Okay. So I would call it like drum kits.
  161. Inside that drum kits folder, I create a folder for each vendor I purchase sounds
  162. from. So let's just talk about exclusive audio.
  163. Okay. So inside of drum kits, I would create a folder called exclusive audio.
  164. Now, whenever I purchase a new sound kit from exclusive audio, I would just drag and
  165. drop it right into exclusive audio's folder, and I'm done.
  166. You know, I know exactly where the sounds are for that company, and it's good to go.
  167. nowadays there's also like sound managers.
  168. So ADSR sounds.com has one. you can like tag and organize your sounds.
  169. I think tools like that are a really, really cool approach.
  170. But personally, I like the minimal flow of like less tools the better.
  171. you know, it's just less kind of like headaches, if there's any bugs or anything
  172. like that, you know, it's like the less tools, the better when it comes to creating
  173. music, in my opinion, that I've discovered over the years.
  174. I personally know where all my sounds are already, and if I need them, I know where
  175. to find them. Okay. So again, that's just how I approach these sound kits,
  176. purchasing them and how to organize them.
  177. Okay. So that's what to look for when buying sounds.
  178. The biggest thing is to be careful not to fall into gear lust.
  179. Your goal is quality and variety..
  180. That gives you a solid foundation to work off of
  181. Also, if you guys come to this episode's page on my website, I'll leave the link in
  182. the show notes. Again, it's episode five.
  183. I'm gonna be leaving links to all the companies I've talked about, as well as the
  184. course creating organic beats, if you'd like to check that out.
  185. Thanks for checking out the episode.
  186. If you had any questions, visit it'sgratuitous.com slash podcast, select an episode
  187. and submit your question at the bottom of the page to the contact form.
  188. If you'd like to take my FL Studio courses, see my current studio and podcasting
  189. gear, read my books, or are interested in lessons, visit the link it's
  190. gratuitous.com slash learning.
  191. That page will redirect you to more info and resources.
  192. I hope the best with your productions.
  193. I'm gratuitous, and I'll see you in the next
  194. episode.
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