if you're tired of using the same old analog drums or south-american percussion samples, have a listen to what fm synthesis can do for your drum parts. long cherished by monolake aka robert henke, it left a big mark on the minimal techno genre. but it can do much more than just those high-pitched, eighth-note toms with tons of swing.

i used ableton live's operator, an fm synthesizer designed by robert henke, to make a set of 60 fm drum and percussion sounds. the samples are available in both native instruments battery format and as an ableton live drum rack. in addition to that, i made a simple instrument rack which gives you 8 knobs to make your own fm drumsounds without any knowledge of fm synthesis.

the samples span 5 octaves and have been organized as kicks, snare, hihats and percussion. the percussion samples are mapped out from low-pitched to high-pitched. as you'll discover, fm drums have quite a special character. to my ears, they sound precise and snappy, but at the same time can resemble acoustic sounds. with a twist, that is.

i use synthesized fm percussion very often, as a complement to fuzzy analog drums and acoustic samples. it's quite easy to give your drum parts something unique. and as everything's synthesized, you can tweak the sounds during a track to obtain results not possible with samples. or with analog drums, for that matter: instead of just tweaking the tune and the decay, as is common practice with analog drums, with fm you can for instance morph sounds from wood-like to glass-like by turning one knob.

to use the samples, download either the zip with the battery kit or the ableton live drum rack. you'll need battery3 and ableton live8 with drums racks installed respectively. to use the drum rack: unzip, double-click the live pack, choose a folder and everything will be installed. the zip with the battery kit contains a folder with all the separate samples, in case you want to use a different sampler.

to use the fm drums instrument rack, save it as an .adg file and drop it on a midi channel in ableton live. you'll need to have live8 and operator installed.

quick download:

• minz operator drums battery3
• minz operator drums drum rack (live8)
• minz operator drums instrument rack (live8)

more downloads and terms of use in the goodies section.