Synthesizing Drum Sounds

i've been working on this in max for a little while now; my current setup has a bassdrum with two sine tones with different pitch envelopes (sounds ok but is not versatile), two hats that are just filtered white noise (again, good but not versatile), and an fm synth snare (my favorite part - very versatile! i usually crank up the indices to have it distort the waveform like mad so i get a lot of noise and just a little bit of tonality).

here's some short bounces of me playing with this patch and a couple other fm synth voices:

http://soundcloud.com/boxus/drumsynth-fm-sample-1

http://soundcloud.com/boxus/drumsynth-fm-sample-2

http://soundcloud.com/boxus/drumsynth-fm-sample-3

Radar, every day I love you more and more.

Regards my last post, I actually did manage to finally come across a pleasing snare sound just yesterday for the track I'm currently working on. It's a couple of the samples I made for the kick drum, played together & pitch shifted up several octaves (not sped up). It's got a nice bit of punch to it, I think. Will post results when the track is finished.

  On 12/30/2011 at 11:23 PM, Wall Bird said:

Radar, every day I love you more and more.

same

  On 12/30/2011 at 10:29 PM, Boxus said:

i've been working on this in max for a little while now; my current setup has a bassdrum with two sine tones with different pitch envelopes (sounds ok but is not versatile), two hats that are just filtered white noise (again, good but not versatile), and an fm synth snare (my favorite part - very versatile! i usually crank up the indices to have it distort the waveform like mad so i get a lot of noise and just a little bit of tonality).

Interesting, thank you! It's nice to hear people experimenting, trying out different kinds of instrumentation.

And yeah, with my current hardware setup, I pretty much have to use noise or six detuned square waves for hi-hats. The upside is that at least you can have fun making them sound strange, mucking around with the cutoff point of the high-pass filter they go through and so on... So they become less like hi-hats after all, and more interesting.

But yeah, the snare's more quirky and interesting in your setup, which is a good idea considering how prominent the snare generally is.

seeing that there is no way to register on the NI site I can't download that patch. :/ I assume the only way to register is to buy something.

yeah you have to be a registered product user to get access to their amazing user library. People pirate it occasionally but it's always on about a month or 2 delay, so the newest and coolest stuff is mostly just for paying customers.

for my money the Applied Acoustics Chromaphone VST plugin that just came out is one of the best and most versatile percussion synthesizers available. It's not great for doing generic 808 sounds or typical analog synth type drum sounds, but it's really good for making realistic approximations of drum samples like skin drums, snares or bass drums and hats.