The sound that is never quite there
You are looking for a kick for a new track. You scroll through hundreds of samples: too long, too short, too many overtones, wrong pitch. After half an hour you pick one that is good enough, and then you still try to bend it to your liking with EQ and compression. Meanwhile you suspect it can be done differently. And that is true: once you understand how a drum sound is put together, you can build it yourself in a few minutes, fitting the track exactly.
This chapter teaches you to synthesize drums: the kick, the snare, the hi-hats and the long tonal 808-style bass. Not because samples are wrong, because they are not, but because synthesis gives you full control over every part of the sound. And even if you simply keep using samples afterwards, from now on you will pick and edit them with a far better trained ear.
What you will learn in this chapter
- You synthesize a kick, snare, hi-hat and tonal sub bass starting from an empty synth.
- You design the transient, body and tail of a drum sound as separate parts.
- You use pitch envelopes and amplitude envelopes purposefully.
- You adapt a drum sound to the arrangement and the genre of your track.
Who this chapter is for
For anyone who wants to make their own drums or edit existing drums with more precision. It helps if you know the synthesis basics: what an oscillator, filter and envelope do. Those concepts are briefly refreshed here at the moment you need them; whatever you are missing can be found in the free intro lessons of earlier modules. Any synthesizer with an oscillator, a filter and envelopes will do; you do not need a specific product.
A preview of the core idea
Every drum sound consists of three zones: the transient (the very first milliseconds, which determine how the sound places itself and lands), the body (the tone and the weight) and the tail (the fade into silence). Once you can hear and design those three zones separately, you never again have to hope that a preset happens to fit. In the next lessons you use that model to build first a kick, then a snare and hi-hats, and finally an 808-style bass, and you finish with a complete drum kit of your own.