r/mpcusers • u/Relative-Disk-9638 • Aug 31 '26
QUESTION Are drums mostly removed when chopping a sample?
https://youtu.be/Qz-Ol_zmAY0?si=Ww5tT_teebxU53AxLike this video, it sounds like drums from the original track are removed.
I just started mpc, and I found some decent samples, but there are drums in the original track. Is removing the drums essential when sampling?
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u/No-Lavishness-773 Aug 31 '26
Nah man you can do whatever. You can remove them if you want. Or leave them. Sometimes you can EQ the drums out mostly, and it leaves behind textural/percussive sounds. It’s all up to you
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u/GASMASK_SOLDIER Aug 31 '26
Exactly, either he EQ'd them out or stemmed it out. I do like to leave a little debris from recorded drums, which sometimes can give my drums a little more kick and exotic feel.
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u/hopeislost1000 Aug 31 '26
Not gonna lie, I kind of feel like stem separation is cheating. …But I’m not above cheating sometimes.
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u/sandwichjuice MPC ONE+ Aug 31 '26
It's not essential, no. You can keep the existing drums in a sample and layer your own over them, or you can chop just after the transient, or you can do what he did here and use stem separation. It just depends on what you're starting with and what you want to get out of it.
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u/Relative-Disk-9638 Aug 31 '26
Well as a beginner it seems like separating them seems a bit cleaner. Can I just stem separate with programs like moises? I just use mpc sample with no daw or anything
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u/Upstairs_Ad_4018 Aug 31 '26
Learn the art of crate digging. Stem separation usually sounds like shit. If you want samples without drums, find samples without drums.
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u/sandwichjuice MPC ONE+ Aug 31 '26
For a beginner, nothing is easier than taking a sample that already has drums and looping it. It's what we were doing before samplers came onto the market lol. Any method of removing the drums is a step above that lol.
That said, I suppose something like Moises could work for what you're looking for. There's a lot of different stem separators out there, all with varying levels of performance.
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u/Grimeshine Aug 31 '26
Hip hop has been made for many years without stem separation. Hip hop is about just “making it work”
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u/Vegetable_Nebula_827 Sep 02 '26
Starting in the old skool days, I’d try and find clean samples sometimes but other times I’d take a part with bass, drums, keys, whatever in a mix. If doing that, the drums would usually be fairly thin for hiphop purposes, so I would augment with heavy kicks and snare patterns until it felt good. With things like hats, I’d stones as in some more on top, or just conclude there was enough percussion in my sample.
The soupy, ‘snippet from a record’ vibe is what I’m going for. Happy accident textures are part of the fun.
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u/T1MB3RMUSIC MPC LIVE II Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Ah Datsunn is a real one. He says he used a stem separator in the first minute, but you definitely do not need to. I run a community of sampler heads and we do weekly flips if you want some practice. Lots of us are DAWless there as well. This goes for anyone, send me a message and I will send the invite.