Electro, gothic, noise, darkwave from the Side-Line
opium1984
offlineMember
ah yes, kickbeat is not really the one in question...its the snare...
how are the punchy snares made? the label in DAWs is always "80s snare" but im wondering how this is done with hardware...any effects used? or is it entirely dependant on what kind of drum machine is used?
Gated Reverb!!!
i think punch comes from the waveform and transients. you can get punch with a compressor
when i think of 80's snare sounds though.. that giant sounding snare is definitely due to a gated reverb which i think may have been done by phil collins on a pater gabriel album first.. can't remember
if you don't have anything to gate.. you can just run it through a reverb and then use volume automation within the daw to attenuate the tail to the desired length
opium1984
offlineMember
ohh well ok then...
something to the effect of Skinny Puppy's "First Aid" would do. also this:
| [+] Embed the video | Get the Flash Videos |
soillodge
offlineTech Moderator
In the industry this is called "cheap drum machine sample through reverb unit". lol
Seriously though, the old Roland drum machines like the R8 had that very snare sound. It was pretty common place. Now you can find those samples around for free. I think on the Boss machines it was called fat snare.
| [+] Embed the video | Get the Flash Videos |
back in the day i'd run my Alesis D4 thru a Microverb3 on the 'Gates' setting to get this effect.
http://www.tokaimusic.com/shop/t/tokai/img-lib/spd_2004100380313_b.jpg
the snare on that MK track sounds like a D4 preset to me.
A truly punchy snare is made with heavy EQ and compression with very little or no reverb. Having owned an R8 I can say that the snare samples in it had a shit ton of compression. The ones on the Power Drums USA card also had some fairly long sampled reverb tails. I cannot say with certainty that there is such a thing as a typical 80s snare sound. What would it be? The Phil Collins gated thing or the Def Leopard cathedral verb monster? Is it the nice white noise based electro-snare of Depeche Mode and Howard Jones or the more sonically disjointed FM synthesis electro-snares of Thomas Dolby and Naked Eyes? For fucks sake there were so many really trendy snare sounds in the 80s how can you really say there is only one? Honestly Janet Jackson had some killer snares on her Control album that blew people away back then.
Personally I am huge fan of the TR-707 (Big Black, Alphaville etc.) but that too was used in such a wide range of different music styles I couldn't say it really is the 80s snare even though it does bring on the nostalgia.
And keep in mind the 80s was an entire decade of rapidly evolving and de-evolving genres with much more artistic flux than we see even now. Pick a year in the 80s and you may find The Snare of 1988 or perhaps it will be The Snare of '82 but they will almost certainly all be quite different.
Oh yeah I just remembered the Rhythmatic 2000. The 1st band I joined in the 80s talked me into buying it at a farmers market for $10. The things are unobtainium now but LORD this ugly thing made the punchiest analog drum sounds I ever heard. 808 and 909 bass be damned this had 'em both beat. One trick we had was to put the thing on its back and mic it up to a guitar amp. Then we would drop a paper clip onto the speaker cone! Oh FUCK! So Sweeet. Even better was the day I kicked it and tore the speaker cone. Holy Jeebus I still have not heard a distorted analog bass that comes close. And yes that was one punchy fucking white noise snare with the volume cranker up.
certainly the 80's snare sound involves reverb most of the time, gated or otherwise. there are so many snare samples out there for free, my favorite place is the kb6 archive -- truly a goldmine. you can find snare samples from all the classic 80's machines. process them with compression (when and if necessary), more verb, some distortion...or none of that. the sounds of 'first aid' are lurking in there though, for sure. for puppy style drums, the drum kits on the old Ensoniq machines are quite close to some of their early sounds. (not saying that's what they used, just it's the right sound...though maybe they did, who knows, they loved ensoniq Mirage's and ESQ-1's back in the day)-- though, needless to say, as always it's in how you mix it, too.
-M
here's a bunch of old drum machine samples i keep on my server. 28mb zipped.
http://www.brainwashaudio.com/transfer/drum%20machines.zip
Plastik Suicide
offlineMember
snare mixed with tom sound and huge gated reverb;)
ssshhhhhh plastik suicide, the snare + tom secret is supposed to be safely guarded!!
but seriously, this is a great and classic trick. a good example is skinny puppy's Hexonxonx, when the snare goes from normal (but still cool) to crazy beefy somewhere later in the song, I don't know for sure what they actually did but typically when I try snare+tom layering, this is the sort of sound I get. very cool, try it!
-M
never tried the snare, tom layering but i've sampled both types from the XS... going to try that and see what it sounds like
You must log in to post.
