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Okay hi guys i'm Dan Larsson and this is the first round of the Skrillex snare drum
tutorial and this is the snare drum what we are going to create:
So as you can see this is a very heavy and punchy snare drum
and as you may remember this snare drum
contains only synthesizers no samples no additional samples from any
kind of other musics or other stuffs
only synhesizers and
only FM8!
You may see yes these samples here but these are
resamped versions of the FM8 synthesizer sounds
because especially in the transient layer I needed to re-effect them
so I will explain this, and why I made this,
but first let's see the layers.
This snare drum contains five layers.
The first is a transient layer which is the resampled version of the
transient
which is basically a small and tiny
percussion kind of sound.
So this was the effected and resampled version of it
and and this is the one which comes from FM8:
so no big difference but in the music, in the snare drum
this change will mean a lot so this will be needed
to make these changes to make this effect.
And the other important and very important layer is the buttom layer
which sounds like this:
which basically is
a simple sine wave with a very very smooth
pitch envelope on it
and yes this comes from FM8 too
but this one
which you can see here
is the same
method but only comes from virus
which you know virus is a different instruments with different sound so
I prefer this one
you can see the difference
so this is the virus
and this is FM8.
I tried to create
with FM8
a similar kind of sound
which comes from the virus but I found that it was impossible because
you know virus is very strong in the low end
so
i will give this part of the snare drum to you
but you can do the same probably mm... maybe i was
only the week one
who couldn't do this with FM8,
but
you will get the sample from virus
and so this is a very important part of the snare drum
but only
with the bottom
and the transient it sounds a little silly.
These two layers: the transient and the bottom is a very important part of the
snare drum
because these will give the main character of the snare.
But of course we will need top layer which sounds this:
which is basically a kind of
hihat sounds
and yes
it comes from a from FM8 too
with various effects after it
and altogether they sound like this:
It is a lot more snare drum sound,
but uh... these still is very very shorts very tiny
so it will need a snare
tail
which you can hear here:
This
noise kind of sound comes from FM8 too
but with two layers.
The first layer sounds like this:
and the other like this:
An all together they sound like this:
And this is almost a very important part of the snare drum, well this time
all of the parts are important
but the tail is still very important because without the tail it's sounds well I
don't know but a little
uh... silly and and a little you know it it won't be handy without the tail
But with the tail
It sounds really cool.
So, this is
the overview of the snare drum
but i forgot to tell you the most and very important part of the snare
drum creating method
which is the distortion.
You know this snare drum is very very heavily distortiened,
it clips like hell
but uh... but these clipping and this distortion this overdrive will give
the taste of the snare drum. Without it sounded a little silly
so as you can see
it is very heavily clipping
But if I pull down
it just doesn't sound the same.
although we have a lot of distortion on the bottom
layer
and on the transient and on the other layers
but it
still needs to be over driven.
So the sounds like this with very heavy overdrive
but without the overdrive, the clipping
it just loses it's taste.
Sso we have to heavily overdrive it,
but this isn't a problem
because as you can see here in the music
in the snare drum you can see it is still very heavily overdriven
and sounds very very cool
And if you can see, if you watch the original
snare drum of Skrillex,
you can see that it's
still very heavily overdriven.
So,
this will be the method
this overview
is
the first part of the tutorial, but
in this first part we will create the bottom layer as well.
So, let's create a new MIDI channel
and drop FM8 onto it!
Hey! I said drop it!
Drop the bass! :) Okay, so
this is FM8
click on expert
and with F oscillator push up the ratio to 2
and select the smooth square wave
oscillator type. The waveform should be the soft square.
I
adjust a little release of the
oscillator and click on the pitch envelope.
Okay so with the pitch envelope we
push up
the attack and pull the
the sustain
and make it a very short decay!
Okay,
this will be a smooth pitch envelope on the
on the
on the bottom layer.
Oh, sorry
i forgot to add a note on the
MIDI channel
and i will use G2
you may use any kind of notes
uh... depending on your taste
i'm soloing its and let's see how it sounds
Well it sounds nothing because we need to push up the envelope, the
amplitude envelope of ... the pitch envelope, sorry!
about forty
six
and shorten it
okay this is the first step, we need to add some effects to
to the sound.
Which in the frist circle...
first round, sorry
is in overdrive.
Okay let's push it up!
It still sounds very different from now
and
and a shelving eq was what I use.
Okay this was FM8
but we need to add another
chain of effects.
And first I will use and overdrive.
Widen it
to affect the whole spectrum of the sound, of the frequencies.
And pulled down the drive.
So this it sounds like this:
it sounds a lot different by now.
And I used a saturator
and I only pushed up the drive to about
I donno... six
and
yes this sounds very cool and you will need
an effect
to push up
the frequencies at about
between 2 and 3 hundred hertz.
And I made this to subtract the middle frequencies.
Okay, this will be our bottom layer.
but as i told you
we can do this with
virus too
yeah because it sounds
a lot different and
it for my taste
from virus it sounds a lot better
so i'm going to show you the settings of the virus. I used sounddiver
I used a simple sine wave
and I cut off
the high-frequency and the middle frequencies and boost up the
resonance to about
eighty four
I used split mode for the filters
and uh... i used
uh... very smooth amount of frequency...
mmm.... what is this? Frequency modulation
and pitch envelope I used too.
and of course i used another instance of the pitch envelope at LFO one
for oscillator one only
and by i don't know what this does but maybe it effects the
filter 2
very very smoothly
I don't know if it's necessary but okay i used that and
and the other important thing for if you have for example the virus
is to add a rate reducer and pull it up
and a light distortion.
Patch distortion
and boost it up to 88!
Okay this was mainly
the settings and yes
please
set the oscillator phase
to
thirty eight
and i think there is nothing else
besides the envelopes
because I used the same envelope settings in FM8 too
so ok this was it i think
this will be very handy for you in the first round
and in the next part we will create the transient
So still then please excited and... So I was Dan Larsson again, see you next time guys!