I’ll be honest – I’ve been fretting over this recipe for quite a while. I did a lot of reading and experimentation with snare synthesis and I had prepared a lot of background text on different snare types and how they might be approximated blah blah blah.
But then I came to a stark realization: You probably don’t want to hear all this – it’s all on Google anyway – but more than that, although snares can be highly individual, the core snare sound is pretty standard and can be synthesized with ease. There’s no big secret. Once you know how to get the basic patch, there is a rich vein of snare variants to be mined from it.
In many modern music genres the snare tends to hit on the upbeat (beats 2 and 4) and serves to give a fixed focus to the entire rhythm. While other drum elements fly around, it is the snare that reinforces the sense of tempo. Thus the snare is often be the loudest instrument in the kit. It is an important reference for our ears. Changing the pitch of the snare can completely change the feel of a beat. To me, short and snappy snares make a rhythm sound more ‘urgent’, but this also depends on their placement.
Snare ‘ghost’ rolls are those barely-perceptible snare-hits in between that can add a lot of interest and variation to a beat without dominating. On the Tempest, the roll feature is perfect for real-time ghost rolls on velocity-sensitive snares.
Moving-on, for patching references we must define a standard. Our archetypal snare is a complex instrument. The stick hits an enclosed drum head, giving the initial impact transient which is then consumed by the rattling of the snares, producing a rich, noisy tail. But there is also some vibration from the second head which adds more subtle elements. Don’t forget that, these days, post-processing makes all the difference. A snare without reverb rarely works.
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