I know many approaches to get tonal snares. But maybe I forgot some important tricks.

What is your best workflow?

Let's say we want EXACTLY this snare...but can't extract it from a song loop, because of overlayerings etc.

It's one of the best "snare-sound-designs" I know...

Could you recreate it, maybe tune able, programmatically?

 

sounds definitely like a snare from a drummachine, drumsynth. first things that pops up in to my mind is roland 707 or something from akai back in the days -

there are a lot of samples our there, u dont need to buy one (of course it would be cool to own one old goldie ;)

the snare in your track could also be made out of this:
snare sample with much attack and less decay plus transient designer on it with a lot of attack. then cut out the low frequencies from the snare (or even leave them in)

and THEN you use a TOM sound from a preferred drumsynth/machine and layer it.

 

It´s a Simmons SDS 5.
Karl

 

It's a snare with a gated reverb

 

I agree. No one should feel called to go back decades to reference a single patch from an old drum machine. Because even then more importantly were the fx applied to that patch. It's quick to find a similar snare, tune it, and the gate reverb/delay settings be the main task.

 

Last edited: Mar 13, 2016

@Jasmine

You can get Reel Machines adpak for Addictive Drums 2 and work with that with the addition of some other tools.
I like that song btw.

 

Snare drum synthesis is one of the more difficult tasks, especially if you want to achieve natural sounding acoustic snares.

These are a few tools that, for me, have proven to be the best for Snare Drum synthesis:
- NI Maschine Drum Synth
- The Snare synth from Arturia Spark
- Reason's "Kong" Drum Synth (still among the best imho, although I don't use Reason anymore)
- Image Line Drumaxx
- Ableton Live Suite with its collection of on-board physical modeling instruments, very powerful and flexible, but that's a more hands-on task however.

Most other drum synths that claim to be able to synthesize drums fail miserably when it comes to acoustic/hybrid snare drum sounds.

If you want the fastest workflow, it's probably EQing, tuning and mixing different snare samples.

 

Yep, that's the one

 

I can make it within 15 minutes, maybe less, with some old rhythm machine samples, possibly Simmons, Oberheim DMX, or LinnDrum, and a gated reverb [Lexicon should work best].

And no, it can't sound natural. Would you say the snare in this song sounds natural? If you want natural sounding snare then make it with some modern multi-layered samples, and it won't sound like this one, but it will sound more natural.

Nice song. I used to like it a lot when I was in primary school. Then I discovered underground music.

 

snare is played in minor pentatonic scale....
Like a person already said, it's a gated snare, either you get it or you don't...
Best drum machines for "reverb-gating" a snare to get that 80s sound are linndrum, roland tr 707 and simmons, most used is linndrum, probably here too.

 

IMO Von_Steyr show you a good starting point, but that snare is not natural. It is very static no changes in tonality over the entire song. You must layer different snare tones(syntesis additive or subtractive). After that you must send it to gated reverb as many says.

 

No,this is not a natural snare,im a drummer who knows acoustic and e-drums very well.
It can be shaped up from one e-drum which is harder,or as it is usually done with layering,e-drum,tom,maybe even toss in an acoustic snare for more body.
You can layer three,four,five our even more drum sounds if you know what you are doing,its really not that complicated as you are making it Jasmine.

 

Analogy: even tits these days are not natural. They are underlayered, overlayered or combination of two.

 

I would go for a tuned SDS5 snare and some gated reverb and be done with it.

But when designing snares like this you can get quite far with layering a noisy transient, a middy pitch-enveloped sine thump, tonal sine and more filtered sustained noise (emulating the bottom snarebed/rattler).
http://www119.zippyshare.com/d/kVPdJXyI/50550/Simmons Snare OS.wav

 

Last edited: Mar 14, 2016

@Baxter...sharing is caring

 

Sorry. Don't be offended, was simple analogy. What i want to say it was about layering sounds. Von_Steyr told you very descriptive.

 

Drumatic 4 (or 3) would be a great start! I don't have any experience with KickR or Chromaphone.
Other tools could be uTonic/Microtonic VSTi from swedish Sonic Charge and german Waldorf Attack VSTi.
I also have some "obscure" (but pretty excellent and no-GUI) drum-tools in the freeware Jeskola Buzz (FuDrum3, LD Snare, etc).

For snare-bed and rattle, start with simple white noise from any subtractive synth. Adjust decay and sustain to taste (usually fast attack).

 

valhalla plate

 

You could try comb filter (i.e., a very very short delay). Try messing with time (=comb sweep) and feedback amount (=amount of comb cut) to get it more or less metallic.
You can even try comb filter on the whole snare (summed layers) as well. Test it to see if you like it.

I don't know if there is any gate that is better than the other. I think most will suffice (they didn't have "advanced noisegates" back in the 80's).

 

Last edited: Mar 14, 2016

To make it sound more natural, as if you're looking for how an acoustic snare would sound to a fan in an Arena. Why not make the tail a bit longer and set the pre-delay to anywhere between 60-120 milliseconds? Adjust pre-delay according to distance of listener to stage. The further they are back the larger the pre-delay.