Drum — one machine, every drum

A drum is something hitting something that rings. A kick is a beater and a membrane, a snare is a stick, a membrane and wires, a conga is a hand and a membrane, a clap is hands and nothing rings at all. Drum is built that way, so it covers all of them:

  HIT ╌╌╌╌╌╌▶ BODY ╌╌╌╌▶ out
   │                      ▲
   └──────────────────────┘   the direct path (bleed)

You do not pick a machine and then hunt for a kick in it. You pick a hit and a body. That is the whole interface, and it is why one machine covers the whole kit.

The two halves

Every drum has an ATTACK (what hits) and a TONE (what rings). Each is chosen from a library of named halves — Beater, 909 tick, Wires, Clap, 808 hat, Sub body, Snare shell, Cymbal, Pluck, FM tom… — and you hear each one as you land on it.

• Arrows < > step through the underlying types.
• The ▾ menu opens the half library — the named, pre-dialled halves — and plays what you pick.
• Each half draws its own one-shot beside its name, so you can see the difference before you hear it.

A half is a type plus its settings: 909 tick and Soft mallet are both the beater click type and sound nothing alike. That is why you browse halves rather than types.

The second hit

A drum can be struck twice at once. A snare is a stick and wires; a punchy kick is a knock and a click. So the hit has two slots, and both are struck at the same instant and added together before anything else touches them.

A drum starts with one. Under the hit is a quiet + second hit — click it and a second node appears above the body, with its own library, its own curve and its own handles. It is not a lesser slot: it browses the same halves and is edited exactly the same way, and the two nodes become HIT 1 and HIT 2.

Each strike also has its own level, which is how loud it sits within the hit. That is a different thing from bleed, which carries the two of them together into the sum.

To take it away again, step HIT 2 to Silent; the node goes with it.

Recipes worth trying: Knock under a Beater click for a kick with mass and surface, Clap under Noise burst for a layered snare, and a short Hiss under anything for air.

Editing is dragging the picture

There are no faders for sound design here. Each half draws itself, and the drawing is the control — the parameters are the curve:

Two modifier gestures work on any handle:

• Alt-drag — pull an LFO open on the parameter you are touching. A translucent capsule shows how far it will sweep, and a bright dot orbits the handle showing the value being heard right now. A small chip appears beside it: click its left half to step the LFO shape (drawn as one cycle of itself), the right half to step its rate.
• Shift-drag — give the parameter a breathe: a per-hit random spread that re-rolls every pass. It draws as a faint corridor of many rolls behind the crisp live curve, so "one deliberate value" and "living jitter" look different at a glance. Breathe lives on a step, so it needs a firing hit selected.

The hit — ATTACK types

Each type reinterprets the same four controls — the two recorded types add a fifth, which direction the recording plays — and the Bench labels and scales them per type. The param column is the name to aim an LFO, macro or p-lock at.

Silent — an empty slot. There are two hit slots, so you can stack a beater and a click, or noise and a clap.

Beater click

White noise through a tilt filter — the beater/stick tick.

Knock

A pitched sine blip with its own fast pitch drop — the beater's body, not its tick.

Noise burst

Band-passed noise — snare wires, shakers, bright percussion.

Recorded hit

A real recorded transient from the project sample pool (64 slots) — a real stick, hand or beater, hitting a synthesized body.

`length` defaults to the 3 ms beater value, so a hit switched to **Recorded hit** needs its length opened up before much of the recording survives.

A recording that ends while it is still sounding fades out over its last 3 ms instead of stopping dead, in both recorded halves.

The waveform is the control. A recorded half draws the actual recording, and that drawing is what you grab: drag its right edge to set rate (how fast it plays is how wide the shape is), and click the waveform itself to flip reverse. A reversed half draws mirrored left-to-right with its read head running the other way, so the direction is something you see rather than something you remember. The band brightens and names the click when you hover it.

Clap

Three hands, then a room. A burst train through a band-pass: three sharp bursts spread apart, then a tail. All hit and no body — pair it with No body.

Hiss

High-passed coloured noise — the hat. colour is the whole character: the metallic comb is what an 808 hat is actually made of, where white is a plain hiss.

The three noise hits split the filter between them: **Beater click** is low-passed, **Noise burst** band-passed, **Hiss** high-passed. Pick by the shape you want, not by a mode switch.

Width

The four noise hits (Beater click, Noise burst, Clap and Hiss) can spread across the stereo field. Turned down, the hit sits in the middle, as a mono drum does. Turned up, each side gets its own draw of the same noise, so snare wires or a hat fill the space between the speakers instead of a point in the middle.

On a Clap, width also places the hands: the first moves left, the second right, the third stays in the middle.

The body is always centred, whatever the hit's width. That keeps the weight of a kick or a snare's shell in the middle, where a mono club system still plays it. Knock and Recorded hit have no width: a pitched blip has no noise to spread, and a recording plays as it was recorded.

A fully wide hit is quieter summed to mono, because its two sides no longer add up.

The body — TONE types

No body — nothing rings; the hit passes straight through. This is what a hat, clap or shaker is, not a workaround.

Sine body

A sine with an exponential pitch drop and an optional flat top. The kick.

Shell

Two detuned partials plus an onset pitch blip — snare and tom shells. The blip is what gives a snare its snap without a second hit.

Modal

Five struck partials with per-mode damping: the upper modes die faster than the fundamental. This is why decay alone walks this body from a rim to a mallet to a tom to a gong — a longer decay does not make the same sound longer, it changes which partials survive, so the tail darkens as it lengthens.

Recorded body

A recorded tail from the sample pool. It rings from the trigger and ignores the hit, like any struck body.

This is the one body that ignores `tune`: a recording arrives with its own pitch. Use `rate` instead to shift it (and p-lock `rate` for a per-hit pitch move).

reverse works the same way it does on a recorded hit — click the waveform to flip it, and the drawing mirrors — but it does something different to your ear. A recorded body is usually a decaying take, so rung backwards it swells: the tail builds into the next hit instead of falling away from this one. That is the reverse-cymbal riser, except it is one body inside one drum rather than a separate audio clip, so it p-locks and it obeys decay.

Metal

Six hard squares at fixed inharmonic ratios through a high-pass — the 808 metal cluster. The squares are the point: five sines cannot get there however they are detuned. shimmer blends in a noise wash, which is what a long crash decays into.

String

A tuned delay line — a plucked string. This is the only body with no voice of its own: it rings purely from what is injected into it, so the hit you choose is the pluck. A beater plucks it one way, a recorded stick another.

The string sounds at its tune whatever its brightness. decay is how long the note itself rings, and it rings as long high up as low down. brightness decides how much faster the upper overtones die: turned down, the pluck goes dull almost at once; turned up, it stays bright to the end. One limit: a dark, high string cannot ring long, and ends sooner than decay asks.

FM

Two operators: a carrier phase-modulated by one modulator. brightness is the modulation index, and bright time is how fast that index falls — a short bright time is what makes FM read as a drum rather than a bell, because the hit starts complex and settles.

Wavetable

A band-limited wavetable scanned by position, across three banks. Band-limiting is per octave, so the tone holds together under a pitch drop instead of tearing.

classic runs sine → triangle → saw → square, harmonic dull → bright, pulse sweeps a duty cycle from narrow to 50%. position is a shape scan, not a brightness — in the pulse bank, narrow is the brighter end.

detune adds a second oscillator, a copy of the same wave tuned sharp. It is drawn as a second trace on the waveform: at a few cents the two drift slowly apart and you hear them beat; wound right up they are a visible interval apart and you hear a chord. At 0 there is no second oscillator at all.

This is the control that makes a Reese, a supersaw or an analog stab out of a drum body — scan position to the saw, open detune a little, and put the voice chain's filter across it. The factory kits' Reese and stab voices are exactly that, and because it is an ordinary body they p-lock, take an LFO and answer to a macro like any other half.

Balance, pitch and level

These mean the same thing for every type, so they are not repeated above.

bleed and res_level are the two wires into the sum on the anatomy view — drag their thickness rather than reading a number. The direct path is not a convenience: a beater click reaches your ear directly, not only through the drum, and without it a kick's tick sounds like it is coming from inside the drum.

Pitched: a tuned body rings at its tune, and — like every parameter — that pitch is p-lockable per hit, so one strike can land an octave up. A drum with No body has no pitch to set, which is correct — a hat rings at nothing.

Reverse

A small arrow runs along the foot of THE DRUM, the way time runs through the hit. Click it to play the whole drum backwards: hit, body, drive and room, reversed as one. The arrow turns to point left, and the drawing above it shows the swell you will hear.

A reversed hit starts on its note and swells into its own transient, so the loudest moment lands at the end rather than on the grid. Place the note early by the length of the swell to land the peak on a beat. The room reverses too, so a reversed snare with some room is the familiar reverse-reverb suck.

Only the first second of a hit is reversed. A longer hit fades in from that point instead of starting on a step. Selected on a single hit, reverse becomes that hit's lock, so a roll can flip direction strike by strike.

The two halves above keep drawing forwards: their curves are the mechanics of the hit, and reverse is what happens to the finished drum.

The moat: p-lock the anatomy itself

exc1_type and res_type are ordinary parameters. Everything that works on a parameter works on them:

• P-lock the hit type per step — step 13 gets a rod instead of a beater, same drum. The bundled demo does exactly this: step 14 of the hat swaps its hit from noise to a beater tick.
• LFO, macro or randomize the type the same way.

A sample pack needs a second file to do that. Nothing in a DAW can reach inside the instrument at all.

Design recipes

• Kick — hit Beater click (length ~3 ms), body Sine body at tune ~55 Hz, drop ~28 st, drop time ~50 ms, decay ~0.35, bleed 1.
• Punch kick — add a second hit: Knock at pitch ~120 Hz with drop speed ~3, over the same sine body. The knock is the beater's mass, the click its surface.
• 808 sub — Sine body, tune ~45, decay 1.6, a little hold for the flat top.
• Snare — hit Noise burst (centre ~2 kHz), body Shell at tune ~180, blip up. Here bleed is the tone/noise balance — the single most useful control on the drum.
• Closed hat — hit Hiss, colour metallic, cutoff ~11 kHz, length ~0.04, body No body.
• Open hat — the same drum with a longer length. Where nothing rings, the open/closed distinction lives in the hit, so p-lock exc1_decay.
• Clap — hit Clap, spread ~11 ms, tail ~0.3, body No body. Widen spread for a roomful of people.
• Crash — a bright short Beater click into Metal, decay 1.6, shimmer ~0.4.
• Tom and rim — the same Modal body, walked by decay: ~0.40 is a tom, ~0.06 a rim. Try it with decay and nothing else and you will hear the family move, because a shorter decay does not just shorten the sound, it leaves fewer partials alive. (The factory Tom and Rim halves also retune and re-weight — a real rim is higher and more inharmonic than a real tom — so they are not a decay-only pair, even though decay is the axis that carries them.)
• Plucked — any hit into String, decay 1.5. Swap the hit to change how it is plucked; that is the control a string wants.
• FM tom — Beater click into FM, ratio ~2, bright time short (~0.05) so it starts clangy and settles into a tom.

Notes & limits

• Two hit slots, one body. Stacking two hits is how a punch kick (knock + click) or a layered snare (wires + clap) is built. See The second hit.
• bleed never changes the body's level — that is res_level, for every type including String. Turning bleed up adds the bare hit; it does not take anything away.
• A String with no hit is silent, by construction. If you pick the Pluck half on a drum whose hit is Silent, choose a hit as well — or load the whole Pluck sound, which brings one with it.
• The drum has a drive of its own, drawn as the small block riding the body's wire into the sum. It saturates the body before its envelope, giving a constant timbre across the hit, which is audibly different from the chain's drive further down the signal. Drag the block up and down for how hard, hold alt for its bias and shift for wavefold, and slide it between its two sockets to put it inside the body or after the mix.
• level, the drum's output gain, has no control on the Bench. It is saved, modulated and p-locked like anything else, and factory sounds set it, but nothing on the page sets it directly.

Plus the shared voice chain, which applies on top of any machine.