Drum Synthesis

  Brandi_B said:

I've never heard any "timpani" sounds that sounded remotely useful.

fixed. ;)

I'm sooooooo tired of using the same drum machine samples. How do you all make drums? especially snares

Electron boxes are all good at making drums sounds, they always have some good envelope options for punchy percussion and noise bursts and that kind of thing. Analog four, digitone, machinedrum, monomachine, analog rytm. Any synth can make percussion sounds but the more envelope options and flexible routing makes things easier. A sampler is also a good tool for percussion, layering and getting samples from different breaks/recordings/mouth/objects in room, etc.

I pick a drum preset on my MicroX and find a good sound, then bash the keys. I also have a Live drum rack built out of different cymbals samples I snatched off of the Paiste website.

  On 4/8/2008 at 6:52 AM, Polymershapes said:

i drum muy oh ebutt into th e wall at sciho so hre girld will smell; thr leadk prehrmones to be had with frm cracks cpread edmiitilms. poppofre, pictariset,. er cannot reveide the heg on her goldnales do we rotato prodfessions and i become a bcattle drufrher all dsdy long for me to have a rprhanckhwoiuedk brejusdtturjriirvsoidfefcojcvosemdsokdjhgtofnkcm sbgahjdkflgo,

  On 4/8/2008 at 8:54 PM, Polymershapes said:

holy FUCK. i 100% swear that i have no memory of writing that, and that i took ambien last night with a beer.

/forum

Pitch envelope on tuned sine or triangle oscillators (just find a good interval, 4th or 5th are common ones), nice snappy exponential amp decay, plus some noise (hi passed, snappy decay).

I made custom racks in ableton operator for kick, snare, hh, etc.

I was on a big synthesis kick but now I just use samples with my own envelopes and filtering and lfo routings.

Slightly random offsets for volume and pitch (or any parameter), are the key to good drums.

I need to get into Live drum rack tutorials. I have a lot of samples laying around, but I want to put them into some thing where I can just select a sample and then twiddle some parameters (pitch, filter, envelopes seems like a good start) to make a good sound. I know the easy fix is to have each sample in it's own Simpler and map a knob to the chain selector, but then if I map the other rack knobs to all the 100+ Simplers' parameters, I get glitches if I twiddle around. I guess that's because there is a 100+ switched on Simplers and even though they don't make a sound, they are still active somehow. I wonder how others have solved this.

I use a mix of DrumSpillage2, Bazille and Zebra for my drum kits. It can be quite frustrating at times but I really like the control over the audio. I’ve gotten quite obsessed with the idea of crafting a sort of kit halfway between a raw 808 and Alva Noto’s drums : I’m getting there, slowly.

Today I got a quite interesting kick with Bazille, using a super short, snappy envelope to trigger a self-oscillating 24dB LPF. « Un-driving » the filter gave a huge dynamic range to the sound. Another EG was used to tune the cutoff (and, consequently the pitch of the kick). Fine-tuning the envelopes though is super tedious, and a small change can make a totally different sound. Now the tricky part is to make it a tad more predictable.

Still I love doing that: with the twist of a knob I can morph that kick into a great sounding e-tom. And that patch is still super simple, so there’s tons of room left to experiment.

Hopefully I’ll soon have a whole kit, and I’ll simply fill a drum rack with Bazille instance et voilà, a sort of custom Machinedrum directly in my DAW!

DrumSpillage is amazing but often I’d love it to sound a tad less punchy (paradoxical I know). No matter how I set the envelopes, I can’t get the initial attack to sound less prominent (without using further processing)...

It’s all about envelopes IMO.

  On 2/15/2018 at 2:45 AM, thawkins said:

I need to get into Live drum rack tutorials. I have a lot of samples laying around, but I want to put them into some thing where I can just select a sample and then twiddle some parameters (pitch, filter, envelopes seems like a good start) to make a good sound. I know the easy fix is to have each sample in it's own Simpler and map a knob to the chain selector, but then if I map the other rack knobs to all the 100+ Simplers' parameters, I get glitches if I twiddle around. I guess that's because there is a 100+ switched on Simplers and even though they don't make a sound, they are still active somehow. I wonder how others have solved this.

No no no no...

Each simpler is grouped individually and has its own macros. No glitching will happen if you do it right.

Just make a template simpler rack that's empty, macro it out, then plug it into drum rack and insert your samples.

  On 2/16/2018 at 5:48 AM, sheathe said:

 

  On 2/15/2018 at 2:45 AM, thawkins said:

I need to get into Live drum rack tutorials. I have a lot of samples laying around, but I want to put them into some thing where I can just select a sample and then twiddle some parameters (pitch, filter, envelopes seems like a good start) to make a good sound. I know the easy fix is to have each sample in it's own Simpler and map a knob to the chain selector, but then if I map the other rack knobs to all the 100+ Simplers' parameters, I get glitches if I twiddle around. I guess that's because there is a 100+ switched on Simplers and even though they don't make a sound, they are still active somehow. I wonder how others have solved this.

 

No no no no...

 

Each simpler is grouped individually and has its own macros. No glitching will happen if you do it right.

 

Just make a template simpler rack that's empty, macro it out, then plug it into drum rack and insert your samples.

 

I just did a test - I started with a drum rack, then dropped an instrument rack on a pad, then filled the instrument rack with 77 kick samples and mapped the 1st macro parameter to the instrument rack's chain selector. The other 7 parameters I mapped to filter cutoff, res, morph, attack, decay, release, pitch transpose (all 7 I also mapped to siblings). Now when I played a simple 4 by 4 kick pattern and messed around with filter cutoff and resonance, if my sample rate was 64 it worked fine, but with 32 I occasionally had glitchy sound when messing with the parameters.

Maybe all this is bullshit and my laptop still isn't good enough to run Live on a sample rate of 32. In any case I guess having a nice drum rack system beats whatever benefit there is to having a 32 samples buffer.

Are sure that 64 samples buffer isnt enough for your needs?

  On 2/13/2018 at 10:45 PM, Kidrodi said:

I'm sooooooo tired of using the same drum machine samples. How do you all make drums? especially snares

Quickest snare for me is a puff of noise (white noise or similar) into a resonant HPF. Resonance just shy of self-oscillation, tune cutoff to frequency of resonant body.

Not necessarily the juiciest sound but you can do a lot playing with envelope and filter, especially modulating resonance by another envelope, or just param-locking it.

  On 2/15/2018 at 4:04 PM, Nil said:

Still I love doing that: with the twist of a knob I can morph that kick into a great sounding e-tom. And that patch is still super simple, so there’s tons of room left to experiment.

 

...

DrumSpillage is amazing but often I’d love it to sound a tad less punchy (paradoxical I know). No matter how I set the envelopes, I can’t get the initial attack to sound less prominent (without using further processing)...

 

It’s all about envelopes IMO.

That morphing is where it's at. I love when drums are elastic play-doh gak that squishes beneath my fingers. Good drum synthesis is some of the most physical-sounding synthesis.

Agree about envelopes, they can really make or break a drum sound.

Another trick I like to do in microtonic/PO-32: add a noise layer with a longer decay for a fake reverb. Use resonant filter to tune it to the other layer.

This isnt helpful for this thread, but every time I see the title of this thread, I cannot help but hear the way Cuckoo says "drum syn-TEE-sis" in my head

  On 2/17/2018 at 1:10 AM, ganus said:

This isnt helpful for this thread, but every time I see the title of this thread, I cannot help but hear the way Cuckoo says "drum syn-TEE-sis" in my head

  On 2/16/2018 at 11:37 AM, xox said:

Are sure that 64 samples buffer isnt enough for your needs?

Yeah after thinking about it, insisting on 32 samples is kind of useless pedantry at this point. I guess I just wanted to push everything to the max now that I have a new computer finally after all these years. :)

Pretty sure I'm set to 128 just to unstress CPU but I have a 2.4i7 16gb RAM

Hmm that's a good point, my CPU is about the same. 128 samples is 1ms on 44100Hz so should be good enough for government work.

Thanks.

  On 2/17/2018 at 1:10 AM, ganus said:

This isnt helpful for this thread, but every time I see the title of this thread, I cannot help but hear the way Cuckoo says "drum syn-TEE-sis" in my head

Same

where's that guy from?

I have zero latency problems these days. Just capture the audio and drag the downbeat back a few ms. It used to bother me so much but in end it's such a dumb issue to focus on. I try not to let things I can't change stop me from working. Learning the workarounds usually make you much more skilled anyway.

My other advice is, why do you need 77 kick samples loaded at once? I often put my kicks in a single instance of impulse, just to minimize my options and solidify a limited sound palate for each track.

  On 2/17/2018 at 8:51 PM, sheathe said:

I have zero latency problems these days. Just capture the audio and drag the downbeat back a few ms. It used to bother me so much but in end it's such a dumb issue to focus on. I try not to let things I can't change stop me from working. Learning the workarounds usually make you much more skilled anyway.

 

My other advice is, why do you need 77 kick samples loaded at once? I often put my kicks in a single instance of impulse, just to minimize my options and solidify a limited sound palate for each track.

I have not had serious latency issues at all. Usually it's easy to mitigate either by your method or just manually calibrating the delays on my external gear.

As for having 77 kicks loaded at once - it's not something that's really important, but I want a way to jam around as much as possible without having to click around looking for samples. So for instance, I can now put the huge AKWF single cycle loops library into 4-5 instrument racks and call it a day. Technically this should not be an issue, but Live only has a dumb workaround for this. I guess what I actually want is the Sampler.

By the way, I actually had no idea my Live had Impulse - I thought it was a Suite thing. Whoops! :D

  On 2/17/2018 at 4:01 PM, xox said:

where's that guy from?