Finding Unique Sound

How to find a unique sound?

The internet is full of free and royalty free resources for producers, composers and beat makers. Hundreds of thousands of loops, one shots and samples are being constantly downloaded to personal libraries. It’s a tedious process where one is required to browse through an enormous pool of media files in order to find and select those perfect sounding synth presets and drum kits which at the end of the day may not be as unique as expected.

From our earlier personal experience, while producing a beat for a rapper friend of ours - we came across an awesome sounding Lo-Fi piano chord sample and decided to use it. After completing the project, we were motivated to move it forward to mixing and mastering stage but were shocked when we ran the beat through Shazam which showed that this exact sample is present on multiple of other records in Apple Music. We came to see that sourcing free material from the web must be used as rarely as possible if the producer has professional plans and goals laying ahead.

Looking forward we understood that it is crucial to look for niche products that contain uniquely created mini-projects, that were crafted via sound designers who know how to operate complex physical machines like modular/analog synthesizers and wicked digital VST plugins that require scientific approach and full understanding of sound engineering.

Needless to say that these products come at a price premium which may seem as a burden to most music professionals. It’s important to realize that level of exclusivity of these sounds will be much higher as well as the risk of sounding generic will be diminished.