Percussion Samples

Percussion covers everything you hit, shake or scrape that never made it into the kit. Congas, timbales, tambourines, shakers, cowbells, agogô bells, guiros, claves, tabla, talking drums, a pair of hands clapping in a hallway. Older than every instrument with strings on it, and still the part of a record people move to first.

Your drums mark out the beat, kick and snare holding the frame, and percussion works every space left between them. A shaker running sixteenths pulls a stiff pattern into a groove. Congas answer the snare on the offbeat. Clave holds a whole arrangement together across salsa, Afrobeat and half the pop records cut since the sixties, three hits against two, and nothing else needs to change for it to work.

None of it has to stay in the rhythm section either. Percussion loops hold a groove on their own, and the same records give up single hits for everything the groove cannot do. A tambourine roll lifts you into a chorus, a timbale fill flags the section change before the vocal lands, one cowbell arrives eight bars in and the track has visibly moved. Those are percussion samples placed exactly where the arrangement turns, one hit at a time.

Bongos cut in a Havana studio, Brazilian pandeiro dates, West African ensembles, Bollywood tabla, plus found sounds nobody could identify today. Our percussion sample library holds all of that, most of it with stems so the shaker arrives without the band around it. Our Sounds section’s royalty-free sample packs need no clearance at all. Our Songs section’s original recordings can be covered by your plan, and both leave you free to release whatever you build out of them.