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[noiseresearch]

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[JoeCat]

Love Operator for drum synthesis. I'll add some stream-of-consciousness stuff, some Ableton specific, some not.

I'll use a synth like Operator with a fixed / adjustable phase oscillator option for a reproducible hit (especially kick fundamental, etc.), and one with free-running oscillators for other percussion - sometimes I'll sample multiple versions to round-robin, or find the hit that's just right.

One "trick" is to layer using a fixed phase for the "meat" with a free-running for the top-end, etc. This way you get a pretty consistent volume and resonant tone with the natural movement you'd get from things like an imperfect strike zone on an acoustic recording (round-robin again).

In Operator, assigning the phase of a looped noise oscillator to a macro and tweaking / automating is a great way to change up the top-end of a sound)

Operator's filter drive can make for some great drum saturation.

Fo super solid kicks, a little eq boost to the fundamental and a limiter is invaluable (I like to squash the click just a bit - the extra few milliseconds for that attack phase really cuts through. For reference, look at some of the kick output of Synapse EKS Pro, which is great if you just want to quickly dial in any of the "popular" analog kicks instead of rolling-your-own or outright using samples).
If you have Ableton, you can assign the pitch and eq boost freq to the same macro (or Drum Buss "boom" freq, which works great as well).

Kinda obvious stuff, but worth noting, especially if you're new to one of the most overlooked "fun" parts of synthesis, IMHO.

[mt3]

One approach is additive synthesis:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... snare-drum
and
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... -synthesis

[e-crooner]

I find cymbals the most difficult to create, especially crashes.

[Chandlerhimself]

I've been experimenting with a new way to do drum synthesis in MSoundfactory. Using a modal filter and white noise I can get the modes/partials closer to a real drum. I'm still experimenting with it, but I made a video on it.

https://youtu.be/Z7IyXZTymoA

[aciddose]

There are a lot of small tricks you can use to reproduce the timbres you're looking for. A lot of the time it helps to remember that phase shifts that occur (like all-pass filters) as sound travels through a medium like the air will make waveforms difficult to recognize.

Despite that, a lot of the elements of these sounds match up perfectly with basic geometric shapes like ramp/saw, triangle, impulses/pulses and so on.

I haven't done a great job but it might be interesting to look at the synth drums bank Xhip comes with. Some of the sounds are worse than you'd expect (I'm sure with some effort someone could do better!) while others are a lot better. The functionality for layering and key-mapping in Xhip is limited at the moment but most of the basic features are there. It just sometimes requires some workarounds to produce more complicated sounds like cymbals which aren't currently possible in a single preset.

[aciddose]

I find cymbals the most difficult to create, especially crashes.

Unsurprisingly, cymbals and hi-hats along with other metallic planar instruments exhibit non-linear properties and have some of the most complicated 3D effects going on. A Rhodes tine is very similar to a cymbal that has been limited to mostly operating in a single axis. A full Cymbal is like an infinite number of tines all connected together pointing in every direction, 360.

[discoDSP]

Both Discovery and Discovery Pro have a 128 presets percussion bank. You can get a lot of ideas and starting points from it.

Since they are using a pretty standard synth architecture once you get how they are done you can design the percussions with any other synth if you want to.

[e-crooner]

I find cymbals the most difficult to create, especially crashes.

Unsurprisingly, cymbals and hi-hats along with other metallic planar instruments exhibit non-linear properties and have some of the most complicated 3D effects going on. A Rhodes tine is very similar to a cymbal that has been limited to mostly operating in a single axis. A full Cymbal is like an infinite number of tines all connected together pointing in every direction, 360.

Sounds complicated I don't really understand what you are saying, though. I am more the empirical kind when it comes to sound design.

[e-crooner]

Both Discovery and Discovery Pro have a 128 presets percussion bank. You can get a lot of ideas and starting points from it.

Since they are using a pretty standard synth architecture once you get how they are done you can design the percussions with any other synth if you want to.

Post some audio, who wants to download a demo version just because of that?

I have made this snare on another subtractive synth, no external processing, yet:

https://app.box.com/s/a36red5bi0f5inhhxht7hj7kjf3bogyn

[aciddose]

Sounds complicated I don't really understand what you are saying, though.

Imagine what you need to do to accurately model a Rhodes tine, or glockenspiel for a very simplified version. The Rhodes tine has two points, like a tuning fork. One point is more like a glockenspiel which changes the resonant frequencies of the fork. The other is a small cylinder which is struck by the hammer and mostly vibrates at a single resonant frequency.

A cymbal is much like this as it has two elements (to greatly simplify): The whole of the cymbal acts similarly to a drum skin, while the ridges in the cymbal create reflections, diffusion and refraction effects which create complex resonances.

So:
1) basic vibration, mostly a single resonance + harmonics,
and
2) resonators

So if you took a Rhodes tine model and multiplied it by 1000 or so with all tines connected together at the center point plus small variations, you'd very roughly approximate the sound of a cymbal. The "transverse waves" (like in a guitar string) would be reproduced fairly well. They'd be limited though because they'd only travel along a single axis and such a model wouldn't account for "longitudinal waves" or any of the "3D" effects caused by the shape and ridges in the cymbal. The only "connection" would be at the single fixed center point, so the two types of waves couldn't travel in arbitrary angled directions.

I am more the empirical kind when it comes to sound design.

This is empirical. The point is that a system like a cymbal is just too complicated to approximate well with a very basic system like a subtractive synthesizer. Even the most basic attempts at cymbal models based on physics (similar to reverb effects) are very difficult to achieve and extremely complex.

[aciddose]

Experimenting with something like Xhip Reverb can get you part-way there. It's like an ultra-primitive version of what I described with multiple tine models. The maximum number is 16 rather than using 1000s, so assuming the approximation quality increases logarithmically (as usual) 16 to 1024 would be as 2^4 to 2^10. So even the 16x situation in the reverb gets you nearly half-way there, which is a really awful approximation of a cymbal It definitely sounds roughly similar though! With some layering and EQ you could get really great synthy cymbal sounds.

[e-crooner]

With a normal subtractive synth one can probably forget to try and emulate the specific way a cymbal works, but merely aim for the overall sound, ignoring why - ideally - it sounds similar in the end. For instance using a drive or distortion effect if the synth has one.

Trying to emulate a hi-hat, I got this far in Sylenth1 with the help of the filter drive control:
https://app.box.com/s/5ia2levu0wtqoffoonqb6g5gpy5ztpky

[aciddose]

That attempt demonstrates the usual TR-808 style result, which is actually suffering from most of the same issues the reverb model does:
http://xhip.net/temp/xhip_reverb_cymbal.flac

Here's a demo of this style (the "Synth Drums 1" bank) in Xhip:
https://soundcloud.com/xhip/gm2-drum-demo

Those hihats/cymbals in action:
https://soundcloud.com/xhip/hah-001

The same style on a single oscillator analog monosynth (kind of cheating, since it's done with audio-rate LFO PWM) (100% all dubbed from the same mono synth):
(edit: I'd removed the old audio clip from soundcloud. This is the solo version.) https://soundcloud.com/aciddose-1/analo ... oscillator

[e-crooner]

Yes, I have several Sylenth1 patches that could be straight from old drum machines, for instance the bongos or congas or whatever it is

The Brazilian whistle thingy in your audio is nice