J. Anthony Allen recreates the drum sound from Daft Punk's "Give Life Back to Music" by finding acoustic samples on Freesound. He identifies the five core elements (kick, snare, hi-hat, crash, shaker), loads them into a DAW, and layers them into a one-bar loop.
Okay. Earlier we were talking about Daft Punk when we were looking at that hi hat hit. And I. So I thought, hey, you know, let's look at a Daft Punk song. It doesn't flow perfectly right out of house music, but yeah, who cares? I'm just looking for another song to give you an idea of how to emulate something. So I grabbed this one. This is off their latest album, Random Access Memories. This is the first track called Give Life Back to Music. Let's just hear a tiny little taste of it. Okay. Pretty sparse, so the first thing I need to do is find some samples that will work well for this. So let's think about these drum sounds. Okay. What do we hear there? We hear primarily acoustic drums, right? So what they're using here is acoustic sounding drums. So let's go grab some. I'm going to go over to Freesound and say acoustic drum kit, I guess. I'm not really sure, but let's try that. Okay. This is a small little pack, but it looks like it's going to give us what I need, except for the hi hat. But that's okay. We'll hunt down a hi hat in a minute. A kick. There's a snare. Let's do that one. And then a kick. That one sounds like it had a little more power to it. Great. So let's loop these first four bars. Actually, let's loop just one bar for starters. So let's grab this stuff and move it over here and zoom in so you can see what we're doing here. Okay, So I see 1, 1, 3, 1 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, etc. What does that mean? Remember, we're looking at quarter notes. 1.2 is the quarter note. So we're looking at eighth notes now here. Okay, that's the eighth note. So I still need a hi hat. So let me just look and see what I have here. What kind of hi hat do I want? Let me just hear this. Well, it's kind of a complicated hi hat. Let's grab that. But I also need a crash for that downbeat. There was a crash. That sounds good, right? For that downbeat. And then I think there's some kind of shaker in there. Let's call it a. Let's see what happens if I look up shaker. Let's try that. Okay, so I hear this kind of shaker. We'll talk about that in a minute. But all of these are pretty much acoustic sounds. So let me just lay out all my elements here. So you can hear them. Okay, so here are the elements. Oops. Let's mute the track. Oops, I gotta turn the loop off. Okay, so five elements are what I hear in it. Cool. Okay, so let's start putting it together.
