Drums

Snare Drum

A self-contained snare drum voice: dual-mode tonal body plus bandpass-filtered noise for the snare wires.

What is a Snare Drum?

A snare drum voice synthesizes a snare from two simultaneous sound sources mixed together: a tonal body and a noise component. This is not a stylistic choice - it is what a real snare drum actually is. The drumhead, when struck, vibrates at one or two dominant membrane modes and that is the body. Underneath the drum, a set of metal snare wires rattle against the bottom head and produce a bright, broadband noise. The ear hears them as a single instrument, but they are physically two sources, and synthesized snares model them separately.

The body half is typically one or two sine oscillators tuned an interval apart. Real circular drumheads have a fundamental mode (the (0,1) mode, the whole head moving up and down) and a higher mode at roughly 1.6-1.9x the fundamental (the (1,1) mode, where one half of the head goes up while the other half goes down). Both modes ring at the same time and their interaction is what gives a snare its characteristic 'tone'. Two sines at those ratios, with a fast amplitude decay, captures most of what your ear notices.

The noise half is bandpass-filtered white noise with its own decay envelope - usually shorter than the body, sometimes longer if you want a sustained 'rrrrrh'. The ratio between body and noise is what every TR-style snare puts under a single knob, often called Snappy: roll it toward 0 and you get a tonal tom-like hit, roll it toward 1 and you get an almost-pure-noise rim shot. The original Roland TR-808 SD and TR-909 SD both work this way, just with different filter and envelope curves.

Our Snare Drum

Webrack's Snare Drum keeps the architecture that defines the sound. The body uses two sine oscillators at the (0,1) and (1,1) membrane mode ratios - approximately 1.0 and 1.833 times the Pitch knob - with one shared amplitude envelope. The noise component is white noise through a resonant state-variable bandpass with its own independent decay envelope. The body and noise are mixed by the Snap knob and run through tanh saturation on the way out.

Eight knobs. Pitch and Decay set the body fundamental and its decay. Snap mixes body versus noise. Tone balances the two body modes. Color and N.Dcy set the noise filter frequency and its independent decay. Drive adds saturation. There's also a V/Oct input for tuned snares.

Architecturally faithful to the 808/909 lineage; this is a clean synthesized snare - two sines plus filtered noise, no analog modeling, no sample. That makes it predictable and CPU-cheap, and it sits well in a busy electronic mix without surprising you.

In a patch

Snares live on the backbeat of nearly every modern drum pattern - hits 2 and 4 in 4/4. Patch a step sequencer with gates on those steps into the snare's trigger input, or use a Clock divided to half time. The snare's gain typically sits a few dB below the kick in a mix and a few dB above the hi-hats, so think about levels at the Stereo Mixer stage.

A few patching tricks that are common: layer a snare with a Clap for thicker backbeats - the clap adds slap and reverb-tail, the snare adds body. Feed the snare's V/Oct input from a step sequencer for tuned snare melodies, which works surprisingly well as a high-tom voice. And the snare voice's envelope output can drive a VCA for sidechain ducking just like a kick - useful when you want pads to breathe with the entire drum pattern, not just the kick.

Inputs

Trig (gate) — Trigger input. Each rising edge fires the snare. Edge-triggered.
Acc (cv) — Accent CV (0-10V). Boosts level for emphasized hits. Patch from Euclidean accent or a sequencer CV row.
V/Oct (cv) — 1V/octave pitch input that adds to Pitch knob. Use for tuned snares, melodic toms, or chromatic percussion.

Outputs

Out (audio) — Audio output at Eurorack levels.
Env (cv) — Envelope follower of the snare's amplitude shape. Use for sidechain ducking or secondary modulation.

Controls

Pitch — Body fundamental, 80-400 Hz. 180 Hz is a classic snare, 100 Hz for low toms, 250+ Hz for high snappy snares.
Decay — Body decay, 30-500 ms. 100-150 ms for tight snares, 300+ ms for ringy toms or boomy snares.
Snap — Noise-vs-body crossfade, 0-1. 0 = pure tonal body, 1 = pure noise rattle. 0.5 is a balanced 909 snare.
Tone — Body brightness shaping, 0-1. Adjusts the relative level of the second body mode for a thinner or thicker body.
Color — Noise bandpass center, 1-8 kHz. Lower = darker, woolier rattle; higher = bright, fizzy snap.
N.Dcy — Noise decay length, 30-400 ms. Independent from body decay - lets you have a snappy short noise over a long ringy body.
Drive — Tanh saturation. Adds grit and warmth.
Gain — Output level, 0-1.

Inspired by

Every TR-style snare follows the same recipe: a tonal body (the drumhead, modeled as one or two ringing sines) plus filtered noise (the snare wires rattling underneath), each with its own decay envelope and a balance control between them. We use two sine modes at the (0,1) and (1,1) membrane ratios for the body and a resonant SVF bandpass on white noise for the snap, with separate decays so you can tune body and rattle independently.

Roland TR-808 SD
Roland TR-909 SD

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