Drum Clap
Rule Uresti
Ok, I'm new to using actual drums, but is there a drum that makes that clap sound. The sound always used on synth drum machines...but is there an actual drum that makes that sound, rather than synths?
Or, bolt a hinge on the end of two 20" 2"x4"'s laying flat on a work bench. Tones can be changed by cutting/boring/drilling varied matching patterns on the interior sides of the 2"X"'s. Just don't pinch your fingers or swear words are automatically added right after the clap.
That's because the early drum machines (most notably the Roland 808) were anaog synthesizers and didn't use actually sample files. That 808 clap sound that you hear in censored loads of popular music is just the synthesizer programmer's approximation of a hand clap sound. That's why it sounds different.
The electronic clap probably is in all likelihood, stratified and multitapped to pluralize the percussive transient thus giving more spread and 'realism' to the effect than one might be able to obtain manually.
Regardless of the nonsense here, using a Meinl Generation X Drumbal will give you the closest sound to a hand clap available for a drum. I plan on buying one very soon. No, it doesn't sound exactly like a clap, but live, it is passable, and it opens up a lot of ideas. Check them out.
To the op, a cheap drum machine will do the trick. Or if you use a computer to record you should be able to find something to download for free. On a recording a few years back, my band had 4 guys clapping and we layered it 4 more. That sounded really fat.
Their is not a magic snare that will do just this, how I would do it is get a 12'' by 3.5'' snare, 2 ply top head (muffled to hell,) crank both bottom and top heads... Or put a splash on a 14'' snare. users choice.
For a long time now, the idea of writing a small drum synth has been one of those "maybe it would be cool if..." tasks floating in the periphery of my Creative Intent plugin prototypes or in my small experiments with generative music. Typically I've put off the idea thinking that it would take more time than it would be worth. But, now that I have Elementary at my disposal, I've found that small experiments or goals like these can be half-day projects, some even shorter than that. So I recently set out to build a small, free drum synth library for Elementary to finally scratch that itch, and in this article I want to share a brief tutorial on how I approached the synthesis of an electronic drum, clap, and hi hat sound.
If you want to hear the examples as you follow along, you can simply clone the repository, npm install, and npm start. Lastly, before we dive in, I want to caveat that the approaches I've taken here for each sound are quite simple. I'm sure that there are more complicated, perhaps more accurate, approaches to synthesizing these sounds, but the approaches I took led me to a set of sounds that I'm happy with for my own musical experiments.
Here, our kick drum function will be used such that the gate argument passed in is a pulse train which alternates between a value of 0 and 1 at some user-defined rate. On the rising edge (a transition from 0 to 1), our envelope will engage, triggering the kick drum sound.
Now to give our kick a nice click-like transient we apply another envelope, this time to the pitch of the sub tone to sweep the frequency of the sub down from a higher value. The tuning here is done to taste, where I run pitch from 5 times the user given value down to pitch itself over a short period of time.
By now, our kick sound is largely complete, but I wanted to add some extra harmonics to the sub tone and drive the kick into more grungy territory with a waveshaper. For that, we simply take our previous sound and push it through an el.tanh saturator with a user specified drive. The complete kick synth, then, looks as follows.
Now, this is all fine so far, but the interesting character of a clap comes from the layering of several such transients, as if several people try to clap once at the same time. It's the slight variations in timing that really make the difference. So, here we simply take the above approach, duplicate it four times, and offset the attacks and decays just slightly. Finally, for one last touch of additional character, I've run the result through another el.tanh saturator.
Synthesizing the hi hat sound ended up being where I spent most of my time with this little project. Like the clap, it seemed obvious to start with the idea that a hi hat, especially a closed hi hat, is little more than a transient which generally resides in the higher part of the frequency spectrum. But just using filtered noise to get there felt to me lacking in the metallic character of a hat. After studying a few other well known drum synths such as the classic TR-808 or the DR110, I gathered that high pitched square waves can be a good building block for the character that I was seeking.
Then, with some additional exploration, I arrived at an approach which uses FM synthesis (via phase modulation) with a single sine modulator and a single sine carrier. The modulator runs at exactly twice the rate of the carrier to generate the odd harmonics of a square wave. Then, to pull in some of the non-harmonic noise character, I used a second modulator, this time a white noise signal modulating the frequency of the first modulator. The FM synthesis looks as follows.
Here, the pitch given to the hat function determines the base frequency of the carrier sine tone, which can be adjusted by the user to tune the metallic character of the hat. Now, as written, we're missing the amplitude envelope and therefore don't have a way of triggering discrete instances of our hat. Let's add that in:
Lastly, especially because of the white noise modulator, we get a lot of frequency content in the mid and low range that we don't need and really don't want with our hat sound, so we can run the above synth through a bandpass filter like with the clap synth. Here we introduce the tone parameter to set the cutoff frequency of the filter, tuned by the user.
To wrap up, I'm happy to share that all of the sounds presented above are free to use in your own projects and available on npm right now. To get started, you can simply add @nick-thompson/drumsynth to your project:
As the title says, the claps and cowbell are sharing the same single track. I hate this. I want everything to be separate. Is there any way I can separate these two?! The tambourine and Shaker are by themselves, why would they then make the clap and cowbell share the same track? The Claps and Cowbell share Inst 25-26, it just makes no sense to me.
Is there a way to re-route each of the drum pieces as I like? For example, I wanna get rid of the room A room B and Leak Tracks which are taking up Inst 16, inst 17-18, and inst 19-20. What if I wanted to instead make the Cowbell inst 16 instead? Is there a way to do this or is it that you just get what you get with the routing when you hit the plus sign to its extent on the Multi-Output track?
Thanks for the response! How unfortunate. I did know about those settings there in the DKD, I just discovered that not too long ago actually. I guess I'll have to send logic some feedback about the Clap and Cowbell sharing the same track. Hopefully they'll change it.
Hate to pester them too much. I just sent them feedback about the "Separate Note By Pitch" function and how when Logic creates the individual new separate tracks, they're automatically grouped together and you can't ungroup them to work on them individually. Instead you have to go and make brand new tracks and then manually drag the regions to the new tracks that you made, which is also silly and annoying. Hopefully they change that also. I'm thinking what's the point of separating each piece to their own track if they're just gonna be tied together so you can't adjust anything individually? '__')
Also called a bass drum, an acoustic kick is struck by a pedal with a beater attached, and is played by the drummer's foot. Electronic versions of this sound are sometimes made to sustain much longer than the relatively short sound produced by a physical drum.
A snare drum is struck with a drum stick, and produces a short, bright sound. A set of wires (called snares) is stretched across a drum head at the bottom of the drum. The vibration of the bottom drum head against the snares produces the drum's characteristic "cracking" tone.
These are two different sounds created by an instrument called the hihat. Hihats are a pair of small cymbals mounted on a stand. The top cymbal is attached to a rod that is raised and lowered with a foot pedal. Hihats are "closed" when the drummer's foot is down, which presses the cymbals together. They are "open" when the drummer's foot is raised and the cymbals are not touching. On an acoustic drumset, there is a huge range of states in between the open and closed position, and each state creates a different type of sound.
If you play a closed hihat while an open hihat sound is still being heard, the closed sound will "win," and stop the open sound immediately. This matches the way hihats behave in the real world; the hihat can't be open and closed at the same time. Hihats work this way throughout these lessons.
Which version of Audacity are you using?
What operating system are you using?
What exactly do you want to do, record drums onto a second track? add a click track? record yourself clapping? import drum samples? something different?
The clap section is quite long though. Three things will likely have to happen to have perfectly in sync flashes throughout the entire section (otherwise the flashes will probably start to drift out of sync)
You can do this for any sound that your system contains.
Look at my topic just next to yours and there you can find lots of different examples.
And i will be happy that someone checks those files out too.
Other option is just to use b-box itself,
there you have a specific line for claps.
Start with the init b-box preset so that everything is clean and record your rythm you want.
save it as a vstpreset.