Snare drum synthesis:

 

The classic Japanese snare drum has two elements to its sound

  1. A pair of sine waves @1 octave apart make for the drum part
  2. Some shaped white noise for the snare…

First the body:

A message box sets the curve~ peak at 0.5 and its decay to zero at 5ms – so a 5 millisecond trigger pulse:

An svf~ in bandpass mode (third outlet) is triggered to generate the sine wave. The second inlet of the svf~ sets the frequency and the third is the filter’s resonance. It is the resonance that determines the tone’s decay. This is, more or less, what a Bridged-T circuit does in some very expensive vintage hardware drum machines.

But we need two of these, first we’ll put some gain control in place:

The live.dial’s second output is attached to the *~ object. The second output gives a 0.-1. output which is perfect for a gain attenuator. The 1. in the *~ object tells the object to use floats (decimals), otherwise all you will get is 0 and 1.

Next we add the second tone generator:

Note it is essentially the same as the first with the addition of * 2 object. This doubles the initial frequency so the second filter is 1 octave higher. Also note:

This makes a very simple crossfader. On the left hand side, 1 is subtracted from the output of the live.dial, giving -1. -0. The abs object makes all values positive, so: 1. – 0. This performs the function of the tone control.

Finally some noise:

Gain control is applied by a curve~ object.

Anyway… hope this proves useful….