I’ve been trying to get more “punch” and funkyness into my house-drums for a
long time now, but I just can’t seem to cut it. I’m looking for a sound like
Justice, Daft Punk, Moulinex, that kind of goodness.

I have been told compression is the way to go, but I simply can’t figure out
how.

Also – do you have any suggestions for free or cheap samplepacks for amateur
house-people like me?

With electronic music, a solid rhythm section (drums and bass) is 100% essential. If you don’t have those two elements going strongly in your track, you can forget about any DJs using it on the floor. So it’s no wonder why we get a couple of emails once and a while about improving your drum sounds.

It’s no secret that dance music is sample-based: many artists lift kicks, snares, and whatever else they can straight from records to use in their own productions. It’s not seen as shady or slimy, it’s just something that’s done. So for an “amateur” producer, good samples (probably taken from a sample pack) is key.

For proper samples, I suggest going to a site like Loopmasters, where sample packs tend to be of pretty high quality and reasonably priced. All sample packs have demo loops so you can at least get a basic idea of what the kit will sound like. All packs are sorted by genre(s), so it’ll be easy get started.

Once you’ve got proper samples and a decent composition you can start mixing. While compression is one factor to getting nice sounding drums, it’s not the only. If you’re not working with samples, there can be a lot of EQing, editing, and other processes that can be applied to drums to get them sounding punchy and tight. But since we’re only dealing with samples here, I’ll cover the popular compression techniques:

1. Sidechain Compression: Certain genres (electro/progressive house) rely heavily on lush synth sounds as well as a slamming kick. Routing the kick to the sidechain input of a synth, every time that kick hits it will duck the synth making the kick sound more pronounced and enabling it to cut through without battling the synth as much. I did a tutorial on it some time ago, so check it out at the bottom of the post.
2. Parallel Compression: Something every electronic music producer should explore: 1) buss all your drums to a stereo channel, 2) place compressor of your choice on said stereo channel, 3) set the buss compressor to something a little more than what you’d normally (feel free to go as extreme as you’d like), 4) blend in the dry (uncompressed) and wet (compressed) drums to your liking.
3. Distortion: Yeah, it’s not a compression method, but artists like Justice place distortion on a lot of different instruments in order to make them edgier/cut through the mix. Put a little distortion/white noise on top of your kick and snare just to see how it works.
4. Transient Shapers/Exciters: Plugins like the Oxford Inflator, Waves TransX, or the upcoming iZotope Alloy (which you will want) all have specific uses, mostly for increasing/molding your transients to get some different sounds.
5. Layering Drums: Layer multiple samples together. This isn’t just used in House music, either. Lot’s of Dubstep producers like to layer snare samples with white noise and claps among other things. Layer a snare with a really deep body with a more hi-pitched snare along with a clap. Try out different combinations until you find something that pops.

Getting solid sounding drums is not easy. It will take a lot of time and a lot of experimentation, but it’s worth it.

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