I can’t stress how important layering your drum samples when building your tracks. Some tracks I produce have three kicks, three snares and maybe two hats going on. The reason for this? Some drums lack certain frequencies and can be filled out with other samples that support those lacking freqeuncies. Beat making starts with your drums, so you have to make sure they’re tight before building on top of them.

First make sure not to have all your samples at full volume. There’s a fine balance to mixing them. A good blend of kicks that works well for me is to have an 808 kick on one pad with a low pass filter on it. This gives you a really smooth bottom. Then on another pad I’ll have two kicks, one that has good bottom/midrange balance, and one that has a snappy top end and some air in it. Tweak the volume and eq’s to your taste. Now you might think, why does my kick need high end? This helps it become more pronounced and cut through the mix. You’d be suprised how much this helps your kick sit in the mix.

For snares I’ll do the same thing. I’ll find a few that compliment each other and them mix until they sound right to me. This is a very common technique, but I think few producers fully utilize this. I love breaks to death, but I always have to layer some drums on top to get the track pounding.

Now don’t get crazy with EQ, remember, always look to cut freqeuncies than boost them. You should have a full sounding drum track with each drum being clear and defined, not muddy or muffled.