17 - Snare


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A kick will only get you so far. For a bit of an old-school groove we also need something snappier in a higher frequency region, and the traditional way to do this is by synthesizing a snare drum. A passable synth-snare can be created by a burst of pink noise.

First of all, let's create the raw material by going to Generate -> Noise and select Pink for our Noise Type. Set the amplitude to 0.2 and duration to 8000 samples. This will give you a burst of approximately 0.18 seconds.

Zoom in on the waveform.

Create a simple amplitude envelope by fading the whole thing out.

Copy the result and paste as many copies as you like into the timeline.

Use the Time Shift tool to move things around until you are happy with the result.

For a bit of variation, you can also select some of the hits and reduce their amplitudes with varying amounts, typically a value around -3db will do the trick.

Create a bit of silence at the end of the loop...

... as well as a bit in the beginning...

... and glue the loop together by selecting the whole thing...

... and run Edit -> Clip Boundaries -> Join to get a single loop out of it.

The final result should look something like this.