Six Samples to Snare Heaven
by Darren Landrum
You don’t need a real drum set for that real snare sound! You just need the awesome new plugin YOTTASNARE ULTRASUPERMEGA! This awesome sample set and plugin features nothing less than 3000 different snares, each one sampled ONE MILLION TIMES at OVER NINE-THOUSAND velocity levels! Get it now! Only $999 for all that snare goodness!
Just listen to this example, done with YOTTASNARE ULTRASUPERMEGA!
Drums Samples Excerpt by Darren LandrumOkay, in all seriousness, the snare line in that clip was created with no more than six samples. And to top it all off, they were six samples recorded using an inexpensive workhorse mic (an Audix i5) pointing at a cheap beater snare I got from a guy on Craigslist for $25. I’m also using the free and excellent Shortcircuit 1.1.2 sampler plugin. I should also point out that no humanization has been done to the MIDI track at all. Every hit is at 100% velocity and in perfect time. (Humanization is usually the last thing I do once I’m finished with a song.)
The six samples were three loud hits (the basic backbeat snare), two soft flams (where you let the stick bounce lightly on the head a few times), and one soft hit (like the soft flams, but no bouncing). Here’s what one of the hits looks like in Shortcircuit:
One of the snare hits in Shortcircuit. Click to embiggen.
The important parts are the high-pass filter and the modulation routing. (The graphic EQ is there just for sound shaping and has nothing to do with the dynamics of the track.) The filter is set to a pretty high cutoff, but that’s because the velocity is being negatively mapped to it. In other words, the higher the velocity, the lower the cutoff and the bigger the sound. I’m also using a random number source to affect the cutoff of the filter, to add some dynamics to the final sound. All of these setting are the same on each snare sample.
So how does the round-robin part work? Well, it doesn’t, at least not with Shortcircuit:
In short, I basically choose which hit to use when programming the MIDI parts. (The lowest note in the screenshot is the kick drum.) I don’t find this to be a big deal at all, but it might annoy some people. However, you might have a more feature-rich sampler plugin with those capabilities, in which case you’re all set.
Now, huge sample packs with lots of velocity layers are nice, but in the world of most rock and roll, the vast majority of your snare hits are really just at two dynamic levels: loud and soft. Pick your levels, create a few variations within each level, use your filters wisely, and you can make a very effective snare track.
And it’ll sound even better once I’ve varied the velocities and humanized it all.
Darren Landrum
Great job on this writeup, Darren. I love layering recordings to make new drums as well. I actually did a video on this a while back where I layered everything from hitting a table with a pencil to a jar of loose change.
Thank you! Just wait until you hear the final result, with the cymbals added and a bit of final tweaking, not to mention a melody line and solos.
I’m very pleased with how this one is turning out.
The kick drum was actually made from a fist pound on my desk combined with an end-slap on my didgeridoo, and a bit of pop-can tab pull to add some ring. I still have that session, so I should do a post on it.
I’ve done drums with pop can tab pulls as well. The resonance and “plink” are ridiculously useful when molded in a sampler.
[...] I got from the side of the road, a crash I got for cheap from Craigslist, and yet, thanks to some creative sampling and determination, I was able to layer together a very effective drum track. The kick and snare [...]