In this modern musical era, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the way snare and kick drum samples sound; specifically, whether they can cut through a mix of several different, heavy instrument tracks like strings and electric pianos. They way your samples sound in a tough mix is referred to as snap in a lot of circles. If you can get your main drum track to snap, your mix will be a lot easier to handle later, but you need to take care in your journey, as too much sound manipulation and be degrading.

Making your own drum samples 'snap' is not very hard with a little practice. You can even use free tools, these days. Just search "free sound editor" on Google to see a list of results; Audacity is a great one! Using compression and equalization are great to begin with. If your work-flow already includes these, good on you - you have a head start now, so use it wisely. Besides using these effects, you can edit sound waves manually, and in this case you would be looking to alter the sound spikes, accentuating the initial attack manually for your drums.

There are a lot of default sound patches in many of the compressor and EQ (short for equalization) units that help you get started when trying to optimize your drum samples for maximum snap that will add definition to your rhythm track. Using these sample patches can be extremely intuitive for newcomers, as seeing the differences in the visual editor will trigger visual and aural cues that match the settings with the impact on the sound.

Compressing your drum samples to add snap is a very common road taken by mixers and music producers alike. Sometimes it can be a bit hard working out what the knobs and dials actually do, so writing down - in your own words - what the changes do to the drum samples, will help you out a lot when making critical decisions later on. Try out different software and hardware compressors, as they also sound a little bit different and you will have trouble with some, while others will be easy to work for you.

When writing down the compression settings you are changing, note how they affect the sound according to your ear. Try not to use sonic and producer jargon, but describe it in perfect English. This will reinforce the effects in your mind. After having noted the effects of each pan and fader, combine them two at a time and write down the cumulative effect of each set. Make sure to mix them all up for maximum comparative description!

As a last tip, you should always try to choose the correct drum samples to start with. If your library is big enough, you really won't have that much of a problem, which is a good thing. The less you need to tweak and alter your current selection of samples, the more time you will have making the actual beat. It will be easier for you to translate the rhythm and sound in your into the sequencer and move on to the other instruments and such, so keep expanding your sounds.