Drum Sample Maker
Make your own trance drum kit: a kick tuned to your key, claps, snares, hats, cymbals and percussion. Shape each one, hear it in a loop, and download the WAVs.
Drum
Sounds to load your MIDI into
Supersaw Essentials: 25 free trance presets for Vital, the free synth. Leads, plucks, pads and gated stabs, voiced for every tool on this site.
Making trance drums
Kick: a sine wave that sweeps quickly down from a high pitch and settles on a note. That note matters: tune it to the root or fifth of your track's key so it doesn't clash with the bass (the Kick Tuner helps you choose). Punch sets how high the sweep starts, Click adds the beater's attack, and Drive saturates it for hard trance. Keep it shorter at faster tempos so the tail doesn't run into the offbeat bass.
Claps are several short noise bursts a few milliseconds apart, then a tail: Spread sets the gap between the bursts. Snares mix a pitched body with a burst of noise. Hats, rides and crashes blend filtered noise with six square waves at the metallic ratios of the classic 808 cymbal.
The kit download holds all eight drums as you've set them, plus your kick tuned to each of the twelve notes, so you always have one in key. For the mixing side, read mixing kick and bass in trance; for patterns, try the Drum Pattern Generator.
Questions
Can I use these samples in released music?
Yes. Every sound is generated in your browser when you download it, so it's yours, royalty-free, with nothing to credit.
What format are the files?
Stereo 16-bit WAV at 44.1 kHz, normalised to −1 dBFS, with a short fade at the end so nothing clicks.
Which note should my kick be?
The root of your key is the safe choice, or the fifth. A trance kick usually lands somewhere between about 45 and 60 Hz: in A minor, that's A1 (55 Hz). The Kick Tuner shows the best options for any key.