ableton, drum synthesis series, sound design Michael L Penman ableton, drum synthesis series, sound design Michael L Penman

Drum Synthesis: Self OSC Kick

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.


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ableton, drum synthesis series Michael L Penman ableton, drum synthesis series Michael L Penman

Drum Synthesis: Snare in Abletons Operator

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.

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How to Make Shuffle Hats

If your trying to inject a sense of pace to your tracks adding in some shuffling hi hats, tambourines or shakers could be the way to go. There are many ways to achieve this but in this tutorial we are going to be using a delay unit to achieve this and specifically Ableton Live’s filter delay which give you the ability to have 3 delay channels. 

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