Today what we are going to be looking at is creating a 808 style hi hat, after you have followed this tutorial you will have all the custom 808 style open and closed hi hats you desire. Lets get started.

Thou wavetable has a category section called noise with some great wavetables they don't have the traditional noise sound we need to make, thou there is a trick to turn these into a hi hat.

Native Instruments Massive is truly a great synth and even with the eagerly anticipated release of Massive X, you should not forgot all the truly huge sounds you can make with the predecessor.

In our last adventures into drum synthesis we looked at using synths to make our drum sound but you can also explore samplers to do the same. All you need is the raw material to get started. So for this kick we are just going to use a sine wave and Ableton’s Sampler.

So far we have looked at synthesising kicks and snares now in the latest blog post in this drum synthesis series we are going to look at creating a clap with operator.

For old analog synth users a happy accident occurred when increasing the resonance to the max. The cool and crazy result of this left a lot of synth lovers angry and confused, but the adventurous among us saw it as an opportunity to experiment and create weird and wonderful sounds!

In this ‘Drum Synthesis’ series blog post we are going to use this “mistake” to build a kick drum, without even using an oscillator or sample.

In this blog post we are going to look at how to make a snare using Ableton’s simply scrumptious FM synth operator. The main advantage of building your own snare apposed to using a sample is you have full control over how the snare sounds. For example does the snare need more body or sizzle?. Does it need to be longer?. Can the pitch bend be deeper?. And that is just a small number of elements that you can change and through out the tutorial we will see the huge array of sound design possibilities that Ableton presents us when making a snare or in fact any drum sound.

Kick Drum samples are great but you can on can only push and adapt them so far. If you change the pitch to much you can lose the tonality of it. So if you are looking to have full control over your kick drums then maybe you need to think about synthesizing them.