Designer drums

With clever sample selection, and perhaps a little bit of layering here and there for extra flavour, you can create fantastic beats with minimum fuss. However, this feature is all about

unique beats… and if there’s one way to guarantee your drum sounds are entirely your own, it’s by designing them yourself.

Electronic drum design is actually pretty basic once you get your head around the process, so let’s get a little conceptual for a minute. As we’re focusing on dance music drums in this feature, we won’t delve into deep acoustic drum theory – we want to make actual music, after all!

Anyway, let’s grab ourselves an imaginary stick and beat a hypothetical drum. The force of your strike will create an initial ‘crack’ – that’s the loud, sharp, inharmonic burst of noise called the

transient. A few milliseconds after that, the drum will resonate to form a more tonal ‘thunk’ sound, which we can classify as the sound’s ‘body’ or ‘punch’. In the case of something like a snare drum, there’s a characterful ‘splash’ element caused by the rattling of its wires. The tight sizzle or decaying fizz of inharmonic hi-hats and cymbals can be thought of as… well, filtered noise. And finally, you also hear reflections from the surrounding environment that combine with the direct signal.

By piecing together approximations of these basic building blocks using synthetic waveforms, sample layers, recordings and virtual ambience, you can start to design your own kicks, snares, hats and percussion pretty quickly. Shape the pitch of tonal oscillators with envelopes to generate a snappy transient and powerful body, mix in white noise for ‘air’ or ‘splash’, then apply some more flavourful layers and processing to blend your own personality into proceedings.

“Let’s grab ourselves an imaginary stick and beat a hypothetical drum”