How to make your own drums

[DubMikey]

Hello everyone!

So, I've been searching all over the damn internet, but I just can't seem to find anything on this, oddly enough.
What I am asking is, how do you make your own kicks, snares, hi hats and so on, from scratch. From no sound whatsoever to a crunchy brostep snare tearing the room apart.

I know this may seem like a newbish question, but I am eager to find out.

[Bournio]

Look on the sound on sound website for synth secrets. They did a bunch about different drum sounds.

[DubMikey]

Look on the sound on sound website for synth secrets. They did a bunch about different drum sounds.

Could you maybe provide me with a link?

[baseband]

google: sound on sound synth secrets

might only be available to subscribers. if you are not an SoS subscriber, I would recommend becoming one.

[Bournio]

No, sorry. On mobile so it'd be a ball ache. Though there is a website you can use to find other websites...

It's available to all, not just members.

[Ldizzy]

just learn about synthesis...

it means sounds u build from simple oscillations

changes ur perception of sound forever

[Electric_Head]

Sound on Sound Synth Secrets.

[Basic A]

What I am asking is, how do you make your own kicks, snares, hi hats and so on, from scratch. From no sound whatsoever to a crunchy brostep snare tearing the room apart.

Brosnare - generate whitenoise via synth, incredibly fast attack, quick decay, quiet sustain, short release... Highpass this...
generate sine wave... very fast attack on pitch, decreasing frequency. same envelope as your white noise in amplitude... overdrive this, and then use a verrry wide bandpass filter to take the top and bottom off...
layer. throw some parralel distortion on the sum signal to glue it together, compress/parralel compression, transient shaping, route to send attach reverb, return send and signal to a bus, more compression... yeah. get creative. envelope everything.

Hihats = little blips of highpassed whtie noise with creative envelopes, this should really be pretty obvious?

Kicks = Same thing as snares, creative envelopes assigned to pitch/amplitude/distortion amounts/ect...

Its all the same concept, there stabby hit things... learn more core synthesis, drums are the easy part...

[Cubicle]

Basically, what Basic A said. Drums are quite simple to make.

You could also pitch up the kick you've made and fiddle around with that + adding some white noise to it to get the "hiss" effect on it.

Going to take some learning into perfecting them tho.

[DubMikey]

I am sorry, but I didn't really get much of what you were saying Basic A. I am really bad at learning from text, always has been and my synthesis skills aren't really any good. Could you maybe provide me with a picture of a basic snare or something?

[Electric_Head]

I am sorry, but I didn't really get much of what you were saying Basic A. I am really bad at learning from text, always has been and my synthesis skills aren't really any good. Could you maybe provide me with a picture of a basic snare or something?

Read the sound on sound link I sent.
It goes through all of it with pictures for you mentally challenged out there.
From kicks to snares to farts.

[minusworld]

you could also pick up a baseball bat or a stick and go hit random objects while recording it .
add some effects.

good luck!

[Ldizzy]

u just need to read something about substractive synthesis at first.. since most people say its the easiest...

download a freeware synth.. or a dirty one if ur one of the kids that think that since theyve cracked massive they can do it like the big guys ... but i wouldnt do that if i were u... try anything stock from ur daw..

u seem to hate reading... go on youtube, type synthesize snare :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlsOGnAkFc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IpWSIttXbw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6an5sUe-Oo

dont know which softsynth ur using, but u WILL have to learn what the knobs on it do.. pick ur weapons and learn them inside and out

tough luv broski

[DubMikey]

u just need to read something about substractive synthesis at first.. since most people say its the easiest...

download a freeware synth.. or a dirty one if ur one of the kids that think that since theyve cracked massive they can do it like the big guys ... but i wouldnt do that if i were u... try anything stock from ur daw..

u seem to hate reading... go on youtube, type synthesize snare :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlsOGnAkFc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IpWSIttXbw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6an5sUe-Oo

dont know which softsynth ur using, but u WILL have to learn what the knobs on it do.. pick ur weapons and learn them inside and out

tough luv broski

Wow, I must be tremendously bad at searching for stuff on both Google and YouTube. When I searched for it, I found nothing. And yes, I hate reading, which is probably my biggest disadvantages when it comes to learning. Thank you for the videos, appreciate it.

I use NI Massive by the way, simply because I love that synthesizer and what it is capable of. (And yes, I bought it with real-life-dollahz)

[JTMMusicuk]

computer music this month takes you through how to do it all, for house music admittedly but the basics are there

[Electric_Head]

computer music this month takes you through how to do it all, for house music admittedly but the basics are there

The sound on sound link I posted has all of it

[JTMMusicuk]

computer music this month takes you through how to do it all, for house music admittedly but the basics are there

The sound on sound link I posted has all of it

just had a look, that site is fucking wicked like
cheers for that

[wub]

Hello everyone!

So, I've been searching all over the damn internet, but I just can't seem to find anything on this, oddly enough.
What I am asking is, how do you make your own kicks, snares, hi hats and so on, from scratch. From no sound whatsoever to a crunchy brostep snare tearing the room apart.

I know this may seem like a newbish question, but I am eager to find out.

In this tutorial, I am going to describe how to synthesize a usable kick drum sound from scratch. You will need a fairly sophisticated synthesizer to follow the tutorial; I used Sytrus.

This sound has three components: the click, the pop, and the body. The click and the pop, sounding together, give the attack its character, with the click providing the treble of the sound, and the pop providing the midrange. The body is the longest-lived part of the sound, and it provides the bass. The only difference between the included variations is the amplitude curve of the body (e.g., "micro" has a shorter amplitude curve than "short"). We will now examine how to synthesize each component of the kick drum sound.

The Body

The body is a pure sine oscillator which changes in pitch throughout its life. It starts with a fairly rapid fall from a pitch in the low mid-range, down to a low bass pitch. From there, it will continue to more slowly fall in pitch for the remainder of the life of the sound, possibly dipping into the sub-bass range. Getting a good frequency curve is essential to making a good bass drum sound.

Having considered the body's pattern of frequency change, we must now consider its pattern of amplitude change. The 'traditional' choice for the amplitude envelope of a bass drum body would be a simple exponential decay, because this is what analog drum machines use. However, this choice would not be maximizing our bass drum's potential: we can give the bass drum a much greater amount of energy, with the same maximum amplitude, by giving it a more extreme amplitude envelope. For the bodies of all of the kicks except for the long kick, I used an envelope which simply stayed at maximum amplitude for most of its duration, then dropped off fairly rapidly at the end. The observant will note that this is essentially the same sort of envelope one would get by applying extreme compression to a bass drum with an exponential decay; using a nonstandard envelope is simply a much cleaner and simpler way to get the same result.

For the long kick, however, I didn't use this sort of envelope; I wanted a bass drum that decayed gradually. Even so, I still didn't want to use an exponential envelope; instead, I used a linear envelope, thus giving me a sound which decayed gradually while still having a high level of energy, relative to its amplitude.

It's quite possible that your synthesizer does not give you this level of control over its envelopes. If that's the case, it's probably giving you plain old exponential envelopes, and I'm afraid that you will have no recourse other than to compress your kicks.

The Pop

The pop is a sine oscillator with a very short decay time that performs a rapid, wide descent in pitch over its lifetime. It should sweep across the mid-range, in order to fill out those frequencies.

The Click

The click is made by a sine oscillator with a high frequency, frequency modulated by another sine oscillator, to create a rich spectrum of enharmonic frequencies. To find acceptable values for the two frequencies, just experiment until you find a sound that fits well with your pop and your bass. My kick uses a carrier oscillator with quite a high frequency, and a modulator with a lower frequency.

For the amplitude, I chose to use a linear decay envelope. The decay must be extremely short; you're aiming to get just a simple 'click' sound, and nothing else.

Blending

Now that you have your three sounds, you need to mix them together. I found that having the click and the pop at about equal levels, with the body about twice as loud, gave satisfactory results. However, you are certainly not restricted in this way, and choosing a different balance, particularly between click and pop, will give your kick a different character.

Fine-Tuning

After making my bass drum sound and looking at its waveform in an audio editor, I found that the initial amplitude was much higher than the amplitude throughout the sound, due to the summing of the click, the pop, and the body all together. Deeming this extra amplitude unacceptable, I added an imperceptibly short attack time to the body, so that it was at a low amplitude at the start of the sound. This fixed the amplitude problem with a negligible effect on the sound.

I also decided that my pop and my click had some undesirable low frequencies. The pop had them simply because it decayed, over the course of its life, to a lower pitch than I had intended; the click had them because of the nature of the FM algorithm. To remove the low frequencies from both of these sounds, I ran them through a high-pass filter.

This sound will work better if you have a synthesizer that resets its oscillators on each note trigger, rather than having free-running oscillators; that way, you get a completely consistent sound on each hit. If your synth has free-running oscillators, I recommend that, once you've finished your sound, you bounce a number of hits to audio, pick the best-sounding one, and trigger it as a sample.

Expansion

You can take this sound in lots of different directions. Play with the different frequencies and envelope curves. Experiment with different methods of synthesizing the attack. Layer other kick samples over the synthesized kick. Process it with some effects. Et cetera. The point of this tutorial was not to give you a prescriptive method of synthesizing kicks, but just to give you somewhere to start, and something to elaborate on. The real point of the tutorial is this: if you're anything like me, then the idea of tweaking your own kick drum sound to perfection in a synthesizer just appeals to you more than trying to do the same thing with samples.

[Sonika]

you could also pick up a baseball bat or a stick and go hit random objects while recording it .
add some effects.

good luck!

Kryptic Minds did that for their snare for one of their songs

Saw it on their masterclass

[JTMMusicuk]

you could also pick up a baseball bat or a stick and go hit random objects while recording it .
add some effects.

good luck!

Kryptic Minds did that for their snare for one of their songs

Saw it on their masterclass

i used that technique in one of my tracks aswel works really well for accidentals if you put lots of delay and reverb on