I've been completely addicted to the sound of the snare in this song.
It's such a satisfying sound. Not unlike a punch sound from a video game from back when consoles had their own sound generation chips. I've tried a bunch of the the usual pitch envelope impulse + white noise with filter/resonance but I can't quite get close to this. I know for a fact that this snare sound is not a sample. It's synthesized. Been trying to make it in Serum. It really shouldn't be complicated but, yeah...

Edit: Embedding doesn't work with timestamps I guess. Skip to 1:06 once the chorus has kicked in although the snare is all over the song.

Any tips or ideas?
And just a heads up, I'm not really looking for comments telling me how awful the song is, as tempting as it may be to write such a comment. I'm just looking to recreate this snare sound, that's all I want to discuss.

 

I understand you would like your thread to stay on-topic. But I have to ask, how do you know "For Fact" that this is not a piece of audio and processed/fx'd ; rather than coming directly from a synth?

 

Ok, apologies for my tired ears (woke up at 3AM and can't sleep), but here's a try:

https://mega.nz/file/t4khjLJJ#DNz_AdwUU5dC3p7XcdZmMdljhdRP8ek-HscnDZIHF9w



So roughly this I tried, a sine oscillator at around 110Hz, shortest attack/short decay ( 100ms or so) for the volume envelope, a bit of pitch modulation (it says 13 semitones on microtonic, but adjust to taste) with a shorter envelope (70ms).

Then a bandpassed noise (1760Hz in this case), with a similar volume envelope but longer decay (160ms here), I used linear envelopes to create that "flat" effect.

Then mixed together that the noise is slightly louder (the osc is just used for the snap/thunk transient). Then compressed with a fast attack, fair amount of it, and finally slightly lowpassed to make it less harsh.

Dunno if this helps, but my brain is still asleep.

 

sounds a lot like the typical white noise snare with a pretty resonant filter. The transient sounds a lot more modern though, so it's probably layered.

 

I haven't had a go at it yet, but it sounds like a hand clap highly tuned, with reverb and of course gated. a gated layer 909 too I think

 

I think it's still just 2 oscillators though. with the noise up, but a low/slower attack/envelope for the noise layer than the other layer.

 

im listening a beatbox snare? or im crazy? Like timbaland style?

 

Out of curiosity, would you say this is in the ballpark?

 

both of them have too much density. but they would be a good place to start, like the clap suggestion is too. The body of the hit sounds almost more like the tail of a cymbal. it is very airy.

An even nicer start would be any of the snare presets in Sonic Academy Kick 2. There are about 10, and they are all 2 and 3 clicks each. Once it's separated like that, then it becomes a question of tuning the transient to match it. The body is just airy, so I was thinking some sort of filtering and a 2+ layer approach. You'd just have more control. Very easy in Kick2, the Distortion is white noise generator.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2022

I'm changing that for a finger click, but I think I'm getting closer

 

that try is almost like that whip effect you can do with a snare with the tail reversed and put in front. it's almost like the opposite of compression pumping. that could be some upward compression with OTT; but to the snare, not the kick. so an envelope there.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2022

You are funny, most probably the snare is in the vengeance sound pack lol, have no compression at all.

 

what part of "almost the opposite" is challenging?

 

Bandpassed white noise at 2.3k (quite narrow Q).

It almost has a swelling rather than a fast transient, so add some amplitude attack time (on the synth) or add a transient designer to reduce the attack.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2022

Produced by the late SOPHIE who famously synthesized all her sounds from scratch.
(Except vocals of course)

 

I think the problem I've been running into so far is that in order to get that pitch I end up with white noise that sounds "too noisy" and resonant. Does that make any sense whatsoever? But dialing it back kind of works against it.
Can noise oscillators sound different from synth to synth? As far as I know the drums were synthesized on the Elektron Monomachine which I've heard sounds unique even among digital synths but white noise should just be white noise, right?

Similar but not exactly the same snare by the same producer but stands out more in the mix.
At 0:34 I think you can actually hear the white noise without the punchy impulse which I agree sounds kind of clappish, but I've only learned how to get the "clap" identity on white noise by doing the "flam" effect that makes it sound like you're hearing several pairs of hands. No flam in here. Anyway it's definitely layered or two pairs of carrier and operator if we're coming from FM.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2022

I had a look at the spectra, I extracted it using Spleeter and then into Sound Forge/Spectralayers. Now, of course a separated signal from an already compressed source is not going to be good, but I think it gives us an idea what's going on here.

First, a single hit:



Looks to me that there is a lower transient (a pitch enveloped sine I think) and the whole hit is fairly short. The selected area is ~150msec but given that on the full track there's a whole lot of other things going on and then maybe some 'verb the audible portion is fairly short.

So yeah, you might be right that the noise part is slightly delayed or attack slightly longer, but there definitely is a lower sound going on here. But I found that using a linear curve instead of exponential for the noise envelope (especially playing around with the attack) seemed better for me.

Let's have a look at the spectra:



I tried centering it to where I think there's the most amount of energy in the noise bit. Here's it's 2.7kHz, but it looks like the higher frequencies are attenuated faster than the lower ones. So I still think it's a BP to a LP(or an EQ cutting the highs).

And here's the lower "thunk":



I kind of overshot my aim here (it's showing 161Hz), but there's definitely a transient here, which is shorter than the noise part.

I'm attaching the extracted wav, and the Microtonic patch I tried if someone wants to dick about with it.

Note, I'm not here to start an argument or anything, it's impossible to tell from a full mix what sort of layering and processing is going on. But there are good suggestions/ideas/takes in this thread so it should be plenty for a solid starting point.

 

If you want to try the flam, the aforementioned Microtonic has a specific envelope for that if you want to try.

 

You misunderstood. I meant that I don't know how to get a clappish sound WITHOUT the flam, since the flam is kind of the main ingredient of what I learned creates the illusion of people clapping. And yea, I've been using Microtonic, it's great.
And thanks for your analysis. Yeah, listening to the snare on the other song I posted which was produced by the same person and how you can hear one of the layers being stripped away during the bridge section it's probably layered or FM with this sort of algorithm. (Only bringing that up cause as far as I know a lot of machines on the Monomachine are FM and FM is popular for making drum sounds in general.)

 

Last edited: May 20, 2022

You can easily layer in a fundamental frequency (body) if you want. But the essence is bandpassed white noise, since it has no weight (or at least very little).

 

Last edited: May 23, 2022