Senior Dunce runs us through their process for the drum samples you NEED!
Nowadays, many musicians simply purchase ready-made libraries, resulting in similar-sounding productions.
Of course, this is a smart choice if you’re aiming for market competitiveness. But for artists who want to be unique in many ways, creating a signature sound can be a powerful strategy.
In this article, we’ll explore five methods suggested by sound designer/producer Senior Dunce for crafting your own percussion instruments.
Senior Dunce is a musician who recently began actively releasing music. Although he coined the name over ten years ago, his main activities until now had been as a music instructor, entrepreneur, club owner, and investor.
2025 marked a solid start for him as an independent artist: his track climbed to #5 on the iTunes US Dance chart and hit #48 on Korea’s Instagram trending songs.
With eight singles released in just this year, he has shown remarkable productivity and since he now intends to focus entirely on music, his next steps are worth watching.
Portable Recorders
The world is equal in one sense: we all have smartphones, and they can record audio. A common misconception is that recordings from a phone aren’t “album quality” and thus useless.
While a portable Zoom recorder or professional Nagra device might yield better results, your phone alone is more than enough to create great percussion sounds.
Creative Knocking
Everything around you can be a percussion instrument. Tap whatever is in front of you. If you’re reading this article on Happy Mag at your desk, start drumming on the desk.
You can build rhythms, make loop samples, or chop the recordings into one-shot hits. Today, Senior Dunce said he plans to use a Korean bamboo flute called “Danso” as drumsticks to turn his fire extinguisher and dunce cap into a percussion instrument.
Samplers
Modern samplers offer countless ways to transform recorded or existing samples into something unique. They allow you to manipulate amplitude, pitch, and filters with individual envelopes.
Contemporary samplers even support FM synthesis and hard sync. A close read of the manual can unlock infinite new sounds.
Effectors
Certain effects can become part of a musician’s identity. A distinctive reverb or a wah filter applied to specific instruments can define a genre. In fact, back in the ’90s, many house producers famously used phasers on hi-hats.
The legendary Eventide H3000 effects processor is now available as a plugin, making it a great option for modern producers.
Synthesizers
Every synthesizer can be turned into a percussion instrument. As long as the sound is short enough, our ears tend to perceive it as percussion. By shortening the amp envelope, almost any preset can be transformed into something percussive.
(A very short transient usually means the sound is percussive.)
So, what do you think? Can you create sounds that are truly your own? If you’re familiar with innovation and disruption, you’ll likely find joy in it.
But if you prefer traditional or glossy sounds, Senior Dunce advises sticking with conventional libraries instead.
“Sometimes people experiment with sound design in search of stylish, mainstream, or classic sounds. But that can become one of the biggest mistakes of your life,” he says. “When I was young, I tried to design glamorous, dance-floor-ready kick drums. That experiment cost me over ten years and turned me into the Dunce I am today. Finally, I decided to turn something I had been doing by mistake into a part of my artistic practice.”
In fact, back in the ’80s and ’90s, many sound designers used synthesizers in attempts to digitally reproduce acoustic sounds.
Nowadays, however, we tend to sample or adapt pre-recorded data to achieve the same results on computers. In a sense, they made the same mistake too.
