Yeah, you can use vengeance if you wanna sound like 95% of the Beatport top 100.

I suggest instead paying for a subscription to Splice Sounds (they're doing a special today for TPF members! Check it out!) and for like $8 a month you can download up to 100 samples a month. Need a clave? Go search for clave! Need a vocal? Look up vocals! You can spend hours diving for content and creating repacks and just building your own unique sound.

Or if you don't wanna pay money, you can always just record yourself making the sounds in your room or process something that was released for free.

everyones talking about serum

Well, the thread title is "Why should I consider Serum?"

Did you really come into a thread about a plugin just so you could trash talk it? Come on, dude.

Try having a sample of a top kick that carries the primary attack sound of your 808 (a click or an acoustic kick's thud or whatever you feel like), then like Heymac said, take a synth and output a pure sine wave - treat that like your 808. For the more rich sounding 808s, throw a saturation plugin on top to add in some extra harmonics.

An 808 kick drum is actually something very simple to create with a single oscillator - it's a sine wave with a really quick pitch fall at the very beginning. Using something like Operator in ableton, you can make a key-tracked 808 in two easy steps:

• Take a sine wave and put a volume envelope on it with no attack, about 1 second of decay, no sustain or 100% sustain (try both!), and about 100 or so milliseconds of release.
• Put a pitch bend envelope on that oscillator with no attack time, about 150-200 ms of decay time, no sustain time, and the release is kinda irrelevant. 2-4 octaves of difference between the start of the note and the end of the envelop should be a good enough range.

Now just find the right note for where you want the kick to land, and voila! For more customization, set macro controls to adjust the attack and decay times of the two envelopes and the sustain level of the volume envelope, the amount the pitch envelop affects the sine wave, the distance between the start of the sound and the end, etc., etc. Save that as a preset in your library, and grab it whenever you want to

Plus all you need to do is disable the pitch envelope and set the sustain to 100% and you have a pure sine wave sub bass for any other kind of tune you make. It's not necessary but it usually considered a helpful pre-mixing practice to have a separate sub in your track and high pass anything that you don't want to have sub frequencies (so basically everything other than your kick and your sub bass) at a point just before you start hearing it actually affect the sound, usually somewhere between 100-350 Hz but you will know when the sound starts to hollow out just from listening.

Every single DAW has some way for you to tap in your tempo (which is just the rate at which every beat occurs every sixty seconds - hence Beat Per Minute), so before you start taking your musical idea down you should find that and tap out the 4/4 you referred to. If you're humming the tune and tapping your feet in time, every four taps is one bar - just tap that into the tempo selector, adjust it if you feel like you need to, and go from there!

A good way to help you learn tempo is to listen to the songs you like and try and determine the BPM/Tempo (the terms are interchangeable) using the tempo selector in your DAW. Then, try to recreate the kick & snare pattern and the basic chords or melody.

While you're at it, here's a good lesson in tempo that might not seem obvious at first: Put your BPM at 70, and do a regular kick on the 1 & 3, snare on the 2 & 4 pattern. Listen to that on loop a few times to get used to how it feels. Then up the tempo to 140, remove the snares on the 2 and 4 and replace the kick on the 3 with your snare. Listen to that loop again. Notice anything?

Please take a few moments to actually read the thread topics of the forum you're posting in before making a post - it's been suggested twice before:

http://theproducersforum.com/index.php?topic=1470.0

http://theproducersforum.com/index.php?topic=988.0

Here are a few workflow tips I've been collecting:

• Organize your library. A bunch of presets in your VST's User folder and a folder on your desktop called SAMPLES is not a library. Start categorizing everything you have by what sound or effect it has, and not the company that made it or program that it's from. Even if you make everything from scratch, you want to be able to remove as many obstacles as possible between you and your songwriting. The more time you spend searching for the right sound, the further you get from a good creative flow.
• Don't try to do everything at once (as has been said). It's really easy to get overwhelmed, so find some way to establish a routine for working on the various things you need to get done: Learning the tools of the trade, creating musical ideas, cleaning and organizing your projects and workspace, sound design, composing and arranging songs, mixing your work, mastering your work, etc. If nothing else, version out the separate aspects of your songwriting process! Have Song_SoundDesign_1, _2, Song_Composition_1, Song_Arrangement_1, _2, Song_Mixdown_1, _2, then end with Song_Master and Song_FINAL.
• Don't just divide up your time, divide up your goals along a timeline. Write down what you want done, what steps need to be done to achieve that goal, and give yourself a deadline for them: Have the song concept written out by next Friday, have the sound design worked out by Monday, have the composition and arrangement done by the end of the month, have the mixdown finished within a week, etc. Put but check boxes next to each step and start checking them off as you pass them. Keep that posted somewhere that you have to see it every single day.
• Decide how you're going to approach the song before you start composing. Do you want to start from the bottom up, where you build your rhythmic elements and atonal sounds and design a simple musical element on top of that? Or do you want to start from the top down, where you design a hook or melodic idea of some sort and create a rhythmic bed to fit under it? What is the focus of the song? The drums? The bassline? A vocal? What emotions do you want the audience to feel when they listen to the song? Ask these kinds of questions so that when you sit down to write music, you have a game plan to work with.
• Practice subtractive arranging - Build up a solid loop of what you think comprises the primary musical elements of your song (e.g. Drums, Bassline, Chords, Melody, SFX) and duplicate it out for however long you want the arrangement to be. Place arrangement markers for the different sections of your song. Start removing everything that shouldn't be in those sections, and you'll start to get an idea of how to design transitions, introduce variety, and arrive at a finished track faster than sitting in loop land asking yourself what you could do to create a song out of this.
• Remember, some of the best songs were made with some of the worst equipment. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the variety of options and become paralyzed - so limitations are your friend, not your enemy! If you only know how to place audio, just place audio. If all you know how to make is supersaws, make a song using entirely supersaws! Spend your music creating time showing off how much you can do with the skills you have, and let your personal time be spent slowly adding skills to that toolset.

Syllabus.

Mainly because "Game Plan" is two words. To kinda expand on what Wontalla said, it's helpful to have a written plan of your goals and what you want to accomplish - you aren't stuck wondering what to learn or what to do, it's all set out for you. Try and think about what the best order would be to learn the things you want to learn and write it out somewhere you can visually reference. Apply that to your projects, too: write out various song ideas before you open your DAW to produce, so you can reference the idea whenever you get stuck.