Best Tools For Hi Hat Snare And Kick Sound Design

7 Snare Drum Design And Programming Tips

Having looked at kick drum design in a previous post, here we're serving up a battery of sound design and programming techniques for the second most important tub in the kit, the snare drum.

Mixing things up

You no doubt have a ton of perfectly crafted snare drum sounds in your sample and plugins libraries, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with using them as is. However, constructing original snares using samples and synthesis is easy and fun, and can really help to personalise a drum kit. Splice together the transient of one snare sample with the 'body' of another, for example; or pitch up a tom tom sample and and layer a short-envelope synth noise oscillator underneath. And when you need to bring an organic flavour to a drum machine-generated snare, mixing in a sampled acoustic drum never fails. Oh, and whatever you do, always get your snare in tune with the track in which it sits using your synth or sampler's pitch controls – or Waves remarkable Torque plugin.

It doesn't even have to be a snare!

Generally speaking, when piecing together drum kits for dance and electronic music, it doesn't pay to experiment wildly with the sound of the kick drum, as it provides the all-important low end pulse for the whole track and so shouldn't deviate from its simplistic essential form. But the snare is another matter entirely, so don't be afraid to get freaky with it. Breaking glass, hammer blows, gunshots, slamming doors… anything with an explosive transient is fair game for pitching, timestretching, filtering and otherwise transmuting into unique snare drums in their own right, or deploying as 'enhancement' layers over actual snares.

Sidestick, brushes, rods and mallets

Speaking of alternative snare sounds, although the regular 'stick' and 'rimshot' articulations offered by your sampled drum kit are likely to be the best choices for most tracks, don't overlook the handful of other options that sit alongside them. The sidestick, for example, makes a great contrast to conventional stick-on-head hits for quieter sections in a song, while brushes, rods and mallets extend the sonic range of the instrument into much softer territory – often ideal for acoustic and 'singer-songwriter' style material. Be careful with brushes, though, as the technicalities behind their correct usage are quite specific and nuanced – if real-drummer authenticity is your goal, you'll want to read up on the subject and make sure your drum kit of choice includes the required articulations (sweeps, circles, etc). Toontrack's Jazz EZX is well worth a look.

Push and pull

An age-old technique used by skilled drummers to subtly alter the temporal feel of a track is landing the main snare drum hits on 2 and 4 (ie, the backbeat) very slightly ahead of or behind the beat. All it takes is a few milliseconds of offset either way (applied manually or using your DAW's track delay parameter) to make the groove seem more lazy and laid-back or driving and energetic, without dislodging the crucial anchor of the kick drum on or around beats 1 and 3. And if you're making house, techno or disco, using multiple layers of snares and claps, shifting individual elements to precisely adjust the overall timing and 'smear' of the hit should be considered part of the sound design process. Do exercise caution with this one, however, as it can be a fine line between 'groovy' and 'out of time'.

Ghost notes

Perhaps the easiest way to bring funk and character to an overly rigid programmed drum track is to work in a few snare drum ghost notes. These are the very quiet offbeat hits that a real drummer will almost unconsciously play with their left hand to give a pattern a sense of locomotion and rhythmic density, and you can emulate them by simply drawing in low-velocity snare notes between hi-hat hits. Don't add more than two or three ghost notes in a bar, and be aware that they only really work with eighth-note hi-hat patterns, as the drummer's left hand would be otherwise engaged when playing a 16th-note hat line.

Know the rudiments

With its military and orchestral heritage, the snare drum is a very technical instrument, and key to any drummer's development is learning and practising its 40 traditionally prescribed sticking patterns, known as 'rudiments'. Very roughly equivalent to scales on a melodic instrument, these include the quaintly named flams, drags, ruffs, paradiddles and ratamacues, and various types of rolls, and are not only important to get a handle on if you're looking to create realistic acoustic drum tracks, but can also be helpful and inspirational when programming fills and embellishments in dance and electronic music. For a comprehensive breakdown, complete with audio examples, check out the website of drumstick manufacturer Vic Firth.

Give it some space

Being characteristically transient in nature, and rich in mid and high frequencies, snare drums are particularly amenable to reverb processing. Indeed, it's fairly standard practise to run the snare through its own dedicated reverb, separate to the auxiliaries shared by other sounds in the mix. Timing is obviously important when setting up your snare 'verb, as you want the tail to be gone by the time the next hit comes along; and EQ, damping and other tail-shaping parameters should be used to ensure that the effect is bedded into the overall drum kit mix, rather than floating above it it.

Reverb can also work well as a more overt special effect on the snare. The dub production staple of spinning a big reverb (or high-feedback delay) in on just the last hit in every four- or eight-bar phrase never seems to get old; while the '80s-style gated reverb has enjoyed something of a comeback of late in synthwave and retro-styled pop. Give them a try.

Share your top snare drum-related tips in the comments.

Ronan Macdonald

Ronan Macdonald is a music and technology journalist of over 30 years' experience. Away from the day job, Ronan is a keen producer and drummer, with a particular passion for 90s hip-hop, jungle, breakbeat and jazz, a hard drive full of unfinished projects and a plugins folder that one day he honestly will get round to tidying up. He's also the dep percussionist for seminal 80s/90s Italo-house outfit Black Box.