Drum synthesis: kicks, snares, hats, claps, and toms from scratch

In a live techno or electro set — whether you’re patching a eurorack, driving a soft synth from a live-coding buffer, or dialing an 808 emulation — sample packs run out fast, but a drum voice you can synthesize is infinitely tweakable mid-performance: pitch, decay, and brightness become live performance controls instead of frozen WAV data. That is the whole task here: own the recipes for every core drum voice so a full kit can be raised from nothing but oscillators, noise, and envelopes, and reshaped on the fly.

The arc starts supported: begin with the kick, the friendliest voice — follow “A modular kick drum is synthesized by modulating a sine wave’s pitch downward with a fast envelope” as your first guided patch, anchored by the physics in “A short downward pitch envelope models the higher-tension membrane transient at drum impact.” From there the same grammar generalizes with less hand-holding: add noise for the snare, swap the source entirely for the hat (“White noise through a modulated bandpass filter is the practical modular hat synthesis patch”), stagger noise bursts for the clap. The morphing objectives then remove the recipe cards: pitch the kick up into a tom, stretch the hat’s decay into a cymbal, tune and lengthen the 808 kick into a bassline — until the unsupported capstone kit is assembled voice by voice.

The required atoms gate the capstone directly: every voice recipe, the fixed-frequency and trigger-mode conventions that make drum patches behave, and the modal-layering and resonant-EQ principles that lift a kit from bleepy to convincing. Supporting atoms enrich with genre flavour and rig lore — the sampler-side one-shot/gate parallel to trigger mode, hardcore’s distorted sawtooth kick, French-touch loop-plus-hits layering, gated-reverb snares, and the 808’s six-oscillator hat circuit — context for taste, not prerequisites for completion.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

noise-percussion

s("white").hpf(4000).decay(0.08).gain(0.3)

_{strudel-0207 · CC0}

synth :noise, release: 0.04, cutoff: 115, amp: 0.5

_{sonicpi-0038 · CC0}

sub-bass

osc 27.5 >> audio

_{punctual-0002 · CC0-1.0}

synth :subpulse, note: :e1, sustain: 0.4, amp: 1.4

_{sonicpi-0016 · CC0}

pitch-drop

s = play 84, note_slide: 0.1, sustain: 0.5; control s, note: 36

_{sonicpi-0037 · CC0}

{ SinOsc.ar(EnvGen.kr(Env([400, 50], [0.1], \exp)), 0, EnvGen.kr(Env.perc(0.001, 0.3), Impulse.kr(2))) * 0.3 }.play

_{supercollider-0018 · CC0}

physical-modeling

Mandolin m => dac; 0.9 => m.pluck; 220 => m.freq;

_{chuck-0043 · MIT}