Ok so many people have big collections of snare samples or even the Reason Drum Kit Refill so why bother creating a snare sound using a synthesizer?

Well for several reasons:

1. Its fun
2. Its educational. You need to know about using the noise oscillators and applying filter envelopes to them.
3. Ive always had a soft spot for Kraftwerk, Jean Michelle Jarre and early industrial stuff like Front 242, and they use analog snares all over the place.
4. The sound of an analog snare is unique and with a bit of tweaking you can definitely have a unique snare of your own.

Ok so first open an instance of Thor and click on the “show programmer” button.

Next set Oscillator 1 to be a noise oscillator and choose the “Colour” setting and turn the “Col” knob to maximum.

Now adjust filter 1 frequency to about 100 Hz and envelope (Env) to maximum and adjust the Filter Env Decay to about 2.3 seconds and finally Adjust Amp env decay to about 1 second and Amp Env Release to about 1 second.

Analog Snare with Thor Image01

You should now have a sound something like this.

Ok so not very impressive. But wait a minute now try layering another noise osc with similar settings but adjust the Color parameter slightly, when both oscs sound at the same time you should get something a little more interesting.

Now try playing with Osc 1 & 2 s Color settings, and the low pass filters Env and Vel Parameters to get varing styles of Snare. You can even try adding a third oscillator to add some static or playing with different Filter types.

Analog Snare with Thor Image02

Now you have the basics its time to experiment. Here are another few sounds made this way.