 Hey, I'm Anfa and in this mini-series I'm synthesizing a Trump drum loop from scratch. In the previous entry we've synthesized the 808-like kick bass and this one we're doing the snare. If you've missed the first entry check it out as I don't want to repeat myself too much. Let's get going! So here's the MIDI part for the snare that I've prepared. Let's loop one busy part of that so we can easily hear what's going on. Now let's open up the SnatsubFX interface and the first thing, I want to lower this one octave down. I also want to make it louder. Now let's play with the frequency envelope to give it that drum quality, basically kind of, but I want to tune it in the free mode so let's enable it. Now I can move all the points freely and add new points in the envelope. That sounds about right. Now let's go to the Voices amplitude and I want to add an envelope. Now in the kick sound I use the Global Amplitude envelope. Now I'm using the Voice Amplitude envelope to just shorten the tone. That's too short. That could be nice. Let's reduce the release time so you can see the whole function better. That's too short of it. Also let's disable this forced release and the same in the Global Amplitude envelope. Now I can hear it releases after the notes ended. And that's what I want. I don't want this to be cut off. Okay, that's nice. So maybe it'll be quiet. Let's make it louder. All right, now this is just the drum body part of our snare. We need to add some snare, so the noise component. Let's create a new voice. Let's enable it. First I'm going to turn it down. Now it's just another side wave. Let's go to Modulation and change it from sound or oscillator to white noise. Let's add a unison voice and now it's a stereo noise. We might reduce the width of it. Let's go to the Voice parameters and here in the Amplitude envelope I want to activate the envelope and again turn it into a percussive. Let's also disable the forced release so it can decay freely even if the note is shorter. Let's go to the Filter settings. I want to add a bandpass filter just on the noise component. So let's enable the filter and change it to bandpass. Now let's tune it. I want this one to be kind of dark. All right, let's make it a little bit louder and shorter. Okay, let's copy this voice and paste it into voice-free. So now we have the same noise component twice but we can change the Filter settings and the Amplitude envelope to give our snare a sharp, bright transient and a darker tail. I think the dark noise is a little bit too short now. Okay, this is the base of our snare. There are three more things I want to do to improve it. First thing is I'm going to go to Global Amplitude settings and here we have a function called Punch. It's these two knobs. It basically adds a volume spike on the start of the note. This is no punch. Let's add a punch and here there is a volume spike on the start of each note which increases our punchiness of course. Now we can make the spike shorter or longer. Let's tune it. I think it's a bit too much and that's about right. However, it looks like we are peaking above zero decibels. Yeah, we can take care of that. So the next thing I want to do is go to Effects, go to Part Insertion and I want to add Distortion. That's way too much obviously. Let's also release the Lopez Filter, make it Stereo, make the Width 100%, back up the Distortion. Can also make it parallel. That sounds about right. Let's see if we're still peaking above zero decibels. Yes we are. We can add another Distortion unit, change the Type to Limiter. Again we need to take care of the Filter and the Stereo. And now this is pretty effectively limiting our peak level. You see we are peaking at negative seven decibels but we are losing a little bit of the punch. So I'm going to dial down the mix to recover it. And also, let's add an EQ in the end. I'm going to change it to Hypes 2 which is a Resonant Hypes Filter and I'm going to find the body of this drum. Yeah that's about right. So I want to be very delicate. I don't want this snare to sound too hyped. But you totally can. Now let's just boost some highs to bring it more brightness because it's pretty dark. Okay I think one more thing we could do is add a little bit of reverb. However we run out of slots here but we have more. However in the Insertion tab. So let's insert an effect for Part 1 which is what we are actually using right now. Let's go to Reverb. This is a huge, really long and it has long pre-delay. Now this sounds way too metallic. Let's also move the low frequencies and make it very slight, maybe shorten the time. But that's our snare. Make your own and put your own character into it. Unless you want to sound like everyone else. But is that really a good way to stand out? Anyway I'll see you in Part 3 where we tackle the hardest sound of the bunch, the hi-hat. See ya!