Dedicated drum synths vs regular synths for drums

[DrSpliff]

I've been thinking for a while and decided to ask the forum. What advantages do dedicated drumsynths such as MicroTonic have over synthesizing drums in a synth like u-he Tyrell? I puta few instances of Tyrell inside of Ableton's Drum Rack and it gave great sounding results. Also, what are your opinions on the d16 909 emulation - good sound quality?

[alphacat]

It's kind of relative, but here goes...

A drum synth [like MicroTonic, which I personally love] will have parameters catering to percussion, i.e. the envelopes have presets that lend themselves to snares, hats, whatever right off the bat - which you can then, of course, tweak further - and other little goodies for beatmakin' like a step sequencer with cutoff control for hi-hats and options for rolls/fills all built in.... which non-percussion-synths don't usually have.

The other factor here is that most drum synths usually use a lot less CPU relatively speaking because the sound isn't as harmonically rich as a musical synth: all drums are a balance between tone & noise, and the tone from synthesized drums is comparatively a lot less complicated than, say, a real recording of a 1974 Ludwig snare.

That said...

If Tyrell is working for you, have fun with it. It's definitely a great sounding plug, esp. for the price!

[DrSpliff]

Thanks for the reply. I tried the MicroTonic demo and synthesizing drums on it is a lot faster I found. This is proberbly due to like you said, only containing parameters that you'd use on drums.

[Electric_Head]

Microtonic is great

[nowaysj]

Yes, d16's 909 sounds good. The workflow is good too.

Tyrell does sound awesome. Just started dabbling w/it, awesome results. Pure love.

Microtonic is doooooooooope.

Whatever works, mate. I've done both, gotten good results from each. Awesome that you are spending the time creating sounds rather than just reusing old shit.

[Electric_Head]

Tyrell is good, I`ll reiterate that for sure.
plus free can`t be beaten

[DrSpliff]

Urs Heckman, the guy who made Tyrell, said in the past that a u-he drum synth could likely happen in the future. That was years ago though, haven't heard much since. Holding thumbs ... Synthesizing your own drums is super cool, no more going through sample packs looking for different sounds, its so nice to be able to just make exactly what you want.

[VirtualMark]

i'm not really into synthesizing drums - they don't tend to sound natural to me. the only program i've used is kicklab, which synthesizes the low end and loads a sample for the high end.

but as far as other drums go, to my ears a proper snare sounds better than a synthesized one. i really like rompler programs such as addictive drums and superior drummer for live sounding drums. for a cleaner sound i'll just use drum samples and process them as necessary.

can anyone who uses drum synths explain the advantages? i'm open to trying anything, if its better at something then i'd like to know about it.

[DrSpliff]

You make make really good drums with synthesis, once you learn how to synthisize them, you can pretty much create the exact sound that your looking for. They are great for layering with 'real' samples too - if your looking to add a specific timbre to it.

[alphacat]

...can anyone who uses drum synths explain the advantages? i'm open to trying anything, if its better at something then i'd like to know about it.

Partially it's just a taste thing - some people like the sound of synthesized drums. There's the obvious iconic 808 hats & kick and what have you, and my personal favorite, the 606 snare. They've been around long enough that they have a musical life of their own.

The other thing, though, is that once you start getting good at designing drums via synthesis, you can A) make pretty much any drum sound you can imagine more or less, including "impossible" drums that'd be like 5 feet wide in real life; and B) you get a much deeper appreciation for and understanding of what actually makes up a drum sound and all of the things that entails - how it sits in the mix, how it plays with other sounds, what defines its character.

And as DrSpliff said, they're great for layering with real snares. Say you've got a real snare sample that cracks like a motherfucker but is missing some mid/low "oomph" - voila! You just synthesize a snare to go under the sample. You could call it Undersnare.