Punchy Drums with Operator

[Music] hey what's up everyone a u5 here today I'm going to teach you how to make punchy kicks and snares from synthesis using only Ableton stock plugins before we begin we must understand the basic components that make up a drum hit the transient the body and the tail the transient is a very short click only several milliseconds which gives the drum a sharp attack the body comes immediately after the transient it is usually a 20 to 200 millisecond tone that is responsible for the punch and fullness of the sound the tail comes after the body and is often perceived as an extension of the body this could be a reverb tail for a snare or a sine wave sub for something like an 808 kick let's synthesize a snare start by loading an operator onto a MIDI track we're going to route our operators in parallel so they don't affect each other so now we have four independent oscillators we will create the body of the snare first because it is perceptively easier to build off of and sculpt the sound into shape alright let's use fixed frequency mode for simplicity's sake let's tune it to 200 so no matter what note I hit it's going to be 200 let's set our initial all the way up and our sustain all the way down and then let's do a 50 millisecond attack 100 millisecond decay let's turn on the pitch envelope and turn that all the way up decrease the decay so we get like a nice sweep 350 milliseconds let's turn this up alright so let's make the transient now we're gonna want to do is set our oscillator to noise loops we could use noise white but noise white is truly random if we use noise looped it will be the same attack each time let's turn up the level on this and let's make the envelope that same thing initial to zero it sustained all the way down make the attack 10 milliseconds and make them do K very short let's put on the fixed mode and let's do it's to 200 Hertz so by using the phase we can change the start position of the noise looped and get a different sounding click but we can tweak that later the third part we want to do is create the tail this is where we would want to use noise white otherwise it would be tonal noise and it might sound weird could work but it's on weird we want the transient end the body to hit and then have the tail fade in so let's make the attack I don't know 100 milliseconds maybe let's try the sustain down just our levels all right starting to come into shape let's shorten our transient little bit more a little bit louder so now we want to do is kind of glue it all together so we're gonna go to the filter section and we're going to choose one of these other filters I've been clean I'm gonna use PR D and that gives us the ability to add Drive to it essentially overdrive so I'm gonna increase this and the volume is going to get louder so I'm gonna have to decrease the volume as I increase this let's crack it all the way up already you can hear the higher harmonics starting to ring out so we want but not that intense there you go that's starting to sound pretty good you just keep the resonance down so at this point this is where we want to start doing processing like the basic sound is there but it sounds kind of dull so let's do let's do an EQ and shape some of the noise up here [Music] at this point it's really just trial and error sculpting sound every time I create a snare it sounds different it's use a glue compressor and the cool thing about glue compressor is we can use the soft clip mode and what that does is it basically is a limiter with a zero attack and release when that essentially just flat tops the the wave so we don't get any we don't get any peaking so as I reduce the threshold you can hear that the transient it starts to get much snappier and everything starts to get even more glued together so I'm going to increase the make up gain to make up for the lost see and reduction it sounded pretty good at this point let's draw a MIDI note and render it out to audio so I'm gonna freeze the track and create a new audio track we have this in audio now and the cool thing about audio is we have the ability to do some interesting things we can splice it and crossfade it so for instance right around here let's see what it sounds like if we just delete this and shorten this you get a more you get a less of a sweepy sound and more of like almost like a more natural sound I can crossfade these together [Music] you can change the start position of this so at this point we could do is we can start adding some automation let's throw some reverb on to this let's filter out the low-end actually hold them let's automate the wet/dry so we have a wide tail but we have a dry body in transient like a nice gated snare sound let's throw an EQ on that so we can filter out the lows what we want to do is create a group and throw the EQ on here and create a chain here and then we can make this full wet and then automate the level of the reverb chain we can well we could essentially freeze this whole track create a new track and drag this entire thing down into a new audio track consolidate it let's do some more-- cueing we can use multiband dynamics to further shape the tail of the sound so we have our high mid and low range if we set the low range to above the body now we have independent control over each frequency band so let's say I want to have the mid-range of the tail to ring out longer what we could do is use upward compression to push the mid-range noise out longer and we can do the opposite we can do upward expansion to make the very top end of the tail shorter you can also adjust our crossovers to get even more precise let's turn off soft knee and RMS use that create new track bring it back down and put a fade on this so at this point if we like our snare sounds but we want to change the pitch of it one way we could do that is by using transpose but the issue with that is the snare gets shorter or longer depending on which way we transpose it and it kind of loses its tambour so because we're using a drum instead of a tonal harmonic instrument we can use a frequency shifter to effectively transpose the drum while preserving its Tambor so we'll use the fine knob to to tweak our snare sample let me put this on loop nice we can continue to shape this sound by adding more layers to it I'm going to load up an 808 clap if we hear how this layers it's not very impressive it sounds almost like the 808 takes away from the punch of the snare so what we could do is create a fade to give the snare some more room for the transient to cut through and allow this to ring out more we add some reverb to it let's do full wet now I have a really lush tail throw some chorus on this it's like the size lower make the decay time a little bit longer I'm very satisfied with this snare so let's create a new audio track and resample this excellent it's important to note that there shouldn't be any gaps or any significantly low points of amplitude in the drum hit right here there is a little bit of a dip but what we can do is we can boost adjust that section you can boost it up and then crossfade it with the rest see how that sounds I'm gonna turn my master down so we're not clipping that verse this it's almost the same it just has a little bit more warmth to it and then we can consolidate that alright there's a new snare drum at this point we can create a MIDI track or a drum rack on there put it right in cell we could do even further filtering let's use high-pass let's tune it to our fundamental give a little bit of resonance let's set it to a less steep slope excuse PRD so we can add some Drive back into it now let's try something let's go into our filter envelope and what we're going to do is we're going to essentially make the frequency sweep up so we filter out all of the lows from the tail but preserving the lows in the transient and the body so something that would sound like this [Music] so turn this on we're gonna want to do is turn this the other way we turn up the frequency [Music] can really sculpt the sound let's try a different filter mode they'll pretty much sound the same to me we could throw a pitch envelope on it tweak the pitch a little bit a really short decay it just adjusts the transient get some interesting punchy effects that way so let's make a kick drum I'm gonna create a new MIDI track let's use operator yet again similar thing applies let's use two fixed set it to 60 Hertz turn our initial up and our sustain down and let's make the attack 100 let's make the decay a hundred let's turn our pitch envelope one let's turn on the filter Drive ahead of time now if we go into our pitch envelope section it doesn't really sound that impressive let's turn the initial all the way up and then bring the attack a little bit more forward there's going to give us a transient but the cool thing is we can adjust the envelope curves with these blue nodes mmm let's bring the frequency even lower let's do 40 Hertz let's make it a little bit longer let's make the attack 150 let's use noise looped for the transient [Music] let's do 300 hearts with that let's really bring it up I want more of a sweep right now it's very subby I'm gonna bring the attack out a little bit more nice we can use our peak transposition to really fine-tune where the punch of the kick hits sounds good around there we can also use this time knob to globally change all of the envelope times for both our transient and our body same applies for the snare you can adjust the transient body and the tail simultaneously using this knob it's good for fine-tuning once you already have the gist of the sound made that sounds good to me let's throw EQ on this get it a bit click here cut out some of the low mids and add just a little boost the low-end right around a hundred Hertz sounds good I'm peaking right now so let's do our glue compressor trick let's turn on the soft clip ooh already that gives us some nice harmonics let's turn a threshold down turn up the makeup not too much changes but we get a nice transient now let's try transposing this we could also use a frequency shifter to transpose just like we did our snare all right let's render this out let's use the MIDI from the snare very simple kick drum let's see what it sounds like if we use a transient from our snare spliced with the body of our kick drum let's do some cross fading let's boost it up a little bit more it's put a glue compressor on here just for limiting [Music] let's fade this a bit more alright now we can consolidate it and throw it in our drum rack we can go into here use the pitch envelope and tweak our attack a little bit more if we will if you'd like to we can add some more Drive to it [Music] and let's like a beat and then just because necessary we could even do some cool stuff with layering within the drum rack we can load up some metallic Foley [Music] and then with some tweaking with that [Music] create those nice ring airs so some Reaver one that we can use some overdrive throw it on the entire snare for even more crunch and brightness it's a bit much use a frequency shifter to tune it even more [Music] I'm totally getting carried away right now but as you can see the possibilities are endless as long as you know what you're doing when you're layering and how to process correctly you should be good I have to mention that it's important to understand that the perception of transients can vary drastically depending on what you're monitoring through the isolation of headphones can make transients sound much louder or quieter than they really are also it's important to listen to drums in context of other instruments in a mix to determine how they truly sound don't forget to Like subscribe and leave a comment if you have any ideas or suggestions as always stay creative stay inspired thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Au5

Views: 116,560

Rating: 4.9763093 out of 5

Keywords: au5, operator, drums, punchy, kick, snare, synthesize, processing, synthesis, au5 punch drums, au5 operator, au5 tutorial, au5 ableton, au5 technique, synthesizer, kicks, snares, plugins, ableton, tutorial, technique, drum, drum processing, drum processor, layering, stock, punch drums, punchy drums, operator tutorial, ableton tutorial, ableton live, music production, sound design, music production tutorial, sample pack, how to ableton, producing, mixing drums, sampling, producer, mastering

Id: ra-mZivYchk

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/zigzaggr]

Nice! I feel like a lot of people are intimidated by drum synthesis when they really shouldn't be. It can be pretty straightforward to get a great drum sound.

[u/ShittingTits]

I swear Au5 sounds like he has a PhD in sound design. So much well articulated knowledge in all of his vids.