Recording Instrument Sounds For Editing

This was originally posted on bpmusic.com on 2/13/2009:

Cool things that might save time and money:

I'll get it started.

Problem

I needed a snare drum sound and had nothing that would work. I'd have to record it myself. All I needed was a snare sound for beats 2 and 4 (4/4 time signature) in 16 bars.

Solution (I was using Sonar and Audition here, but other software would work just as well)

1. Created a MIDI track to play several snare hits at the velocities I would need.
2. Used the closest snare sound I had to what I wanted.
3. Rendered the MIDI track to audio (in Sonar, just freeze the track to do this).
4. Saved the frozen (rendered audio) track to a wav file.
5. Used audio editing software to tweak the snare samples and layer some other sounds to get the desired sound. Decided to add the effects I wanted at this stage, but could have added fx later in Sonar. By adding them now, though, I wouldn't have to be concerned with running more effect plugin's on my system -- some of them take a lot of computing power..
6. Imported the edited snare audio files into Sonar.
7. Placed them on an audio track at the correct measures/beats.

Not as easy as having the right thing in the first place, but it saved a lot of time over searching for the sound I was looking for.