Drum Synths

[Boooke]

Hey, I've heard a lot of people mentioning drum synths. I myself haven't been using anything else than processed samples in my mixes - except for a few times I've been doing some simple thud kicks and claps through Sylenth or Massive. I've been trying to make gabber-esque kicks for a little while, but it sounds like crap, so I begun to research it a little... Everywhere I look they suggest drum synths. Are they of any use? I'd like to check them out, but not sure if they are worth the money compared to just trying creating the kicks with sylenth or massive as the base.

 

[lostnthesound]

I'm personally not a fan of dedicated drum synths as I like to have pure organic sounds mixed into to my kids (though I do layer some synthetic hits with the organic ones). However I've found that a dedicated drum sampler such as Battery 4 is extremely valuable to my workflow. Being able to edit, process, and route everything within a single plugin is very convenient. To add, many of the kits within Battery contain samples made from drum synths, so you essentially get the best of both worlds. To add, drum samplers such as Battery 4 contain hits that change based on the velocity of the key, which gives the kit and sequencing a more natural, humanized/expressive feel and a bit of variation with regards to the timbre of each hit.

Cheers.

 

[miszt]

any synth will do tbh, for a gabba style, i'd use a pitch-bent sine wave, a little bit of tail, maybe a touch of verb, then saturate/tube distort etc; maybe with a sub clean sub pitch bend sine aswell. adding in noise helps aswell, with creative use of filters to get a good sound


your favorite synths almost certainly have drum patches with them, worth checking out how they put them together

 

[Boooke]

Hey guys, thanks for your replies and the tips. However, I don't mind the sound of synthesized drums, my acoustic samples will usually get processed alot anyways. In fact, I'd sometimes prefer it, when attempting techsteppish things or even just house (Can't help sneaking reeses into everything either, lol). So I miiight try out a free drum synth if I can be bothered, but yeah... I kind of figured a normal synth could do the job as well

I've heard of Battery, and looked into it now. Seems pretty useful for creating fun drum samples and loops with pretty much instant creativity. Sometimes processing samples in Cubase can be a drag, like pitch shifting...


Without completely changing the topic, it sounds like a lot of the drums in techstep/darkstep, and whatever genre they now invent for it, has some ind of low end to every sample. Take this, for instance:

I get the heavy compression. Usually, I remove anything else below 100 hz and sometimes even go higher for anything but the kick, but these snares sounds like they got some low end, or is it just me?