where do all the bad sample packs actually come from??

[nopattern]

in the past 8 months I have taken on a few students from the art school i work at in chicago, giving private lessons to some aspiring house/techno producers who have discovered ableton. believe it or not, ableton is still virtually unknown here despite the school i work at being considered a "cutting edge" art/technology school (Columbia College Chicago) but thats another battle altogether against the middle aged department heads that still think protools is the only way...

Anyway, so these students usually bring their laptops over to my studio and I have noticed that all of them are using these commercial sample libraries, many of them having the same libraries with ridiculous names like "deep techno-house" etc...

I have to say that im underwhelmed by the quality of this stuff, especially when i found out how much they are paying for these things, some around $100 per pack. I did some more research on some of these sample packs and many of them claim to be recorded/processed with various pieces of gear, some of which i even own.

none of these packs sound anything like the machines they claim to be recorded from. I made my students a sample pack using my elektron md and some jomox gear recorded through some good preamps and my students were in awe of the quality difference to what they are spending money on

So it leads me to the main question, where are these sound lirbaries coming from? Surely anyone with experience and a machinedrum could put together a nice set of samples and sell it but why do all these libraries which make all sorts of claims about gear and processing usually sound all the same and nothing like the claims they are making. my students transfered me some of the libraries and after going through some of them i maybe find 1-2 decent sounds out of 500+ samples... why do people buy this stuff and where are these sounds coming from in the first place?

[importedearthman]

I'm curious too. You're only going to find out from those students exactly where they got those bad samples packs from. I believe there are a lot of 'bad' samples packs in the pirate community. Most software pirates are idiots that don't know what they're even pirating. Thieves who steal stuff for the sake of stealing. They end up with a lot of garbage.

I'm not saying those students are stealing the stuff. Just saying where I think most "bad" samples come from.

[H20nly]

they come from the hole where money disappears.

[arafel]

+1 most samples in sample packs are garbage.

Out of the dozen that I blew money on a few years ago (young, stupid and had some cash), only the Spectrasonics stuff was of any real use (Distorted Reality is still killer Imho).

I'd rather have a dozen killer samples than a mountain of crud wav. that just slows down workflow.
But as they do sell.. more crud will keep coming - its the interwebz.
So ya gotta teach those students to be diligent and very particular in sound choice.

[tw1nstates]

Yeah some of them are pretty bad.

There is a certain company that ripped a whole bunch of samples from other ppl (y'all know who they are) that i had a listen to some of their stuff and it was amazingly bad.

i mean, really, really, really, really bad.

Recently I found a couple fo good uns though.

It's tough for da kids cos if you dont have good sounding stuff then your productions are going to sound bad from the get go.

And if your ears aren't great cos you are starting out then you essentially are going to delay your development a fair bit. .

[LithiuMind]

I had a couple of sample packs, as well as large banks that friends had collected over the years and gifted to me...and yes I found the same thing you are mentioning. Lots and lots of crap. It seemed that a lot of the commercial packs would take maybe 30 samples and just effect the differently (distort them, add reverb, other wierd processing) and that good clean samples were few and far between.

I made it my mission to weed out all the crap and spent about 2 weeks going through every single sample and dividing into A and B banks...I still haven't gotten rid of the B banks because I am a packrat...but now I have an A bank of maybe 100 kick/snare/hihat etc. samples which I know are all clean; no distortion, no floor noise, no crap.

It makes a hell of a difference!

I found a lot of gem samples in the Vengeance Libraries, but yes you still have to sift through quite a lot of garbage.

[oblique strategies]

they come from the hole where money disappears.

[MacGuffin]

from my experience, Goldbaby's samples, high quality acoustic instrument samples, those are the good packs to buy.

Buy samples of sounds you couldn't mic better yourself.

Anything that has the name of a style of music (or some other dumb pseudo-trendy halfwit genre sobriquet) on it is total bullshit and no one should buy that. Unless maybe you make jingles for used car ads or something and need generic stuff that kinda sounds like the popular stuff out there.

[hubiedubie]

Goldbaby, Riemann and Wave Alchemy all seem pretty reputable and good quality for me. Not mad on those "Minimal Techno Song Starters" type packs - very dodgy.

[nylarch]

PureMagnetik FTW. Sign up for their service (6 USD per month I think) and have a great new pack show up at your door every month right when you need some inspiration.

oh and GoldBaby is amazing too.

[KrisM]

The internet is a smear of sample pack sites. More than I can even possibly remember.

I'd avoid buying the ones named after genres/subgenres or "sounds", too. Though Wave Alchemy is an exception to the rule. Drum Tools 01 - Minimal Techno is awesome, imo And they give away free subsets of their packs, too.

I wonder if some of these sites swipe CM/FM/EM cover DVDs and "process" the samples to fuel their online stores

It's not as cool as using, say, a MachineDrum or something to do it, but I rather like making samples of sounds made with DrumSpillage and my other synths to use in my songs.

[cmreal04]

The organization of some of these packs is just as bad as some of there content....

[3phase]

thats the same question as the question where all the crap music comes from...

[casiblake]

They certainly don't come from Wave Alchemy... I have their Drum Tools 01 pack and it is literally my go-to drum sample library, for every single track I make. Apologies for the hideously overused phrase there, but I've never been so happy with a sample purchase.

[mr.adl]

+1 for Goldbaby and
+1 for Wave Alchemy

Those are just GREAT value for money