Electronic drum sounds in sound design
For particular genres of film and TV music, things that go bump in the night are particularly important. Impactful slams are used heavily in trailer music, of course, but you’ll also find them in sci-fi and horror movies and even for the kinds of epic scene-setting music which accompanies particularly significant sports events. The only problem for sound designers of these kinds of hits is that whilst you can often get amazingly trashy, impactful slams from hitting bits of metal together or recording foley sounds and layering them, it’s hard to get microphone sources to capture truly low, rib-shaking bass. That’s why the techniques we’re looking at through this tutorial are as valuable to those interested in sound design for picture as they are for composers and music producers.
Adding an 808-style kick to the biggest, deepest hits – perhaps layered with low toms or a single Taiko hit – can make an enormous difference to the sonic impact of a deep slam, particularly when played back through larger speaker systems. Just as music producers spend hours layering sounds to create composite kicks and snares, so sound designers employ similar techniques with synth-based drum and percussion design an essential part of their process. And just as sound designers will regularly take sounds they’ve recorded and revel in the process of using any technique necessary to warp and mangle those sounds into impossible to imagine new shapes, so the principles of drum synthesis can provide similar sonic adventure playgrounds.
A noisy snare-like sound with a long decay tail can be reversed and have its initial hit snipped off the end to provide an anticipatory ‘whoosh’; a kick drum can also be lengthened with a slower, longer pitch envelope to produce a stomachlurching sub drop. Just imagine how much further you could go with extra processing, with worlds of possibility afforded by granular synthesis, effects processing and parameter automation all helping to tailor drum sounds even further. Familiarising yourself with synth percussion design is a huge benefit for making it happen.