A drum sound is a short event with a distinctive shape: an attack, a body and a tail. Shaping those three parts - or building them from scratch with a synth - gives you drums that are yours rather than the same samples everyone uses.
The anatomy of a drum
- Transient (attack) - the click or snap at the very start. It decides how punchy a drum is.
- Body - the tone: the pitch of a kick or tom, the resonance of a snare.
- Tail (decay) - how long it rings out. Long tails fill space; short ones leave room.
Shaping tools
- Amp envelope - in a sampler or synth, shorten the decay for tighter drums, lengthen it for bigger ones.
- Transient shaper - boost or reduce the attack and sustain without changing the level threshold, unlike a compressor.
- Pitch - tune drums up for snap, down for weight. Tune kicks and toms to the key of the track.
- Pitch envelope - a fast downward pitch sweep is what gives a synthesised kick its punch.
- EQ - boost weight, cut boxiness (often 300-500 Hz on kicks), add snap.
- Saturation and distortion - add harmonics and aggression; make a kick audible on small speakers.
- Compression - fast attack tames transients; slower attack accentuates them.
Synthesising drums
- Kick - a sine wave with a fast pitch envelope falling from high to low, plus a short amp envelope. Add a click (a short noise burst or transient) for definition.
- Snare - a tuned tone (or two) for the body, plus filtered noise for the rattle, each with its own short envelope.
- Hi-hats - high-passed noise or metallic tones with very short envelopes for closed hats and longer ones for open.
- Toms and percussion - pitched sine or triangle tones with pitch and amp envelopes.
FM drums
FM synthesis is superb for drums: carrier and modulator at non-integer ratios produce metallic, inharmonic tones - cowbells, bells, clangs, metallic hats. A modulator with a very short envelope adds a bright, clicky attack to a kick or tom. The next chapter covers FM in DX7 V in depth.
Make it fit the track
- Tune kicks and 808s to the root of the key.
- Match decay to tempo: long tails suit slow tracks, short ones fast tracks.
- Process drums together on a bus so they sound like one kit.
Do this now
- Synthesise a kick in Pigments from a sine wave with a pitch envelope, then tune it to your track's key.
- Build a snare from a tone plus noise.
- Take a sampled snare and transform it three ways using only envelopes, pitch and a transient shaper.