Making your own snare?

A

Andy-K

New member
How do you go about creating your own, unique signature snare? For example, young chop's snare, lex Lugers snare... Did they stack different sounds to get their sound or create it from scratch somehow?
 
Live sampling or synthesis if you want to make them from scratch.
And as for layering, could fuse drums you find with your own scratchmades for unknown benefits.
 
Layers usually get you pretty far. Also, you can put some subtle effects on some of your snares.

I, for example, often use a touch of overdrive on my snares to give them a bit more power. But layering is great because it gives you sound profiles from each different snare. All you have to do is EQ them properly so that it sounds good.
 
layering or synthesis is usually the main way, but doing something like adding a pink or white noise under an existing snare might change it a bit too
 
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I was thinking about this myself. I think you just gotta be creative, like take a boom bap snare, eq it and layer it with trap snares or something like that.
 
You can make a snare out of really crap samples, if you're good at layering. The more exotic your samples, the harder it is and the weirder your final result.
I like to use vintage drum machine samples layered together maybe with a real accoustic snare and occasionally when I'm feeling really experimental some weird foley: a saucepan, a beatbox noise, my djembe. I also synthesise my own hits using a drum synth sometimes.

Be warned though... layering is really difficult. You'll want to look up all the yt tuts you can find to get a good idea of the process, and practice a lot. The generalities of it are: separate out the different envelope sections and mids/lows/highs in each layer, check for phase misaglignment, compress.
Maybe some distortion or reverb at one point.
 
You can sample an original sound from different snare samples or you can create one from scratch with some FM synthesizer
 
How do you go about synthesizing an 808 style snare? Is it the same process as a kick but higher octaves and noise?
 
from the ts-808 info at kvr (a free 808 emualtor)

Snare Drum
The base frequencies of the SD tone generators are 174.614 Hz (F2) and 349.228 Hz (F3).
SD Tune alters the pitch of the tone generators by up to +-12 semitones.

KVR: TS-808 by Tactile Sounds - Drum Synth VST Plugin for Windows


I'd use a triangle for both oscillators and then ad a little white noise and filter to taste (a bit of resonance might help as well)
 
Play around and you'll find a snare that you keep going back too. You can save the presets so its quicker to place in new tracks...or you can just sample it once you're done. Who knows, if it's sweet somebody else might sample it too. xP
 
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