electronic audio visual artist ___ maxmsp | dsp | algorithmic

The Snare Drum

So I got a little bit of a low-key gibe from friends in the MaxMSP Livestream I did the other day, all in good fun I know, and accurately speaking I am pretty loose with what I call “drums” or “beats”.

This set me off on a little journey to see about designing a ‘realistic’ or close to a realistic electronic snare drum, or at least something I can drag into a patch and say “here’s the snare drum!” and the comments section doesn’t explode in laughter 😉

The Snare Drum

I found this great article by Sound on Sound Magazine called Synthesizing Drums: The Snare Drum

It’s a pretty good read and with some pretty straight forward patching diagrams. I basically just plugged these diagrams straight into Max and what do you know, it sounds like what I think you folks think a snare drum should sound like. Play around with the frequencies and the functions/eg’s and you can get some pretty interesting and wild snare drums. Add some controls to change frequencies and you can get into all sorts of weird places. 

Here’s the diagram:

the-snare-drum

The goods:

maxmsp-snare-drum-tomhall

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