I'm looking for some good drum sounds, preferably synthesis rather than sample based. I'm not that good at making these things myself so I thought I'd take a look at what others have already come up with. I don't necessarily need a suite or even much of an interface, just something that makes noise that I can play with. Any suggestions?

Old thread, but eternally relevant subject. I do all my sounds from scratch unless I'm desperate for some acoustic sounding stuff. I'm attaching a patch that yields multitudes of percussive sounds from hihats over bells and clank-clonkies to plain weird shit. For your cowbells and and dings and dongs and prrrsccHHHHOOOUNGs this patch delivers. It's fitted with a randomizer for all osc controls and a preset store / recall function.

fmperc.zip

For now, envelope and filter is not stored in presets, but you can control those (just like everything else) with messages

I get this error:
0-a: no such object
0-r: no such object
0-hpf: no such object
0-pld: no such object

Haven't tried to figure out why yet. I did download the whole zip obviously.

EDIT:
Works anyway after I press the "reset envelope & filter" message. Cool sounds!

@nuromantix Sounds like I forgot to put a loadbang somewhere. I don't get those error messages tho.

Here's another old one I spend a couple of hours dressing up for ease of use:

addperc.zip

This one is based on additive synthesis (6 oscs), with a couple of algorithms allowing you to control the sequence of (un)harmonics and their respective gain with a simple math equation. It excells at metallic bell sounds, but can produce a lot of other weird noises depending how you tweak it. Enjoy!

@bocanegra this isn't working for me because of a broken object named [ar~]. Is this a custom abstraction that you forgot to attach?

Ah, yes, sorry- it's in the fmperc.zip but ill just attach it here:

ar~.pd

Can't get this one to do anything.....

@nuromantix there's an abstraction missing in the zip file (the ar~ a simple envelope with exponential curves), I attached it in the following post, but here's the full zip with [ar~] included:

addperc.zip

Thanx nuromantix, your patches sounding xtremely good!

@bocanegra, addperc works nicely (and sounds great) in Pd-l2ork but not in vanilla. In the latter I get the following errors:

0-sqt: no such object
0-range: no such object
0-vcof: no such object
0-vcor: no such object
0-vcoa: no such object
0-mixg: no such object
0-mixr: no such object
0-mixa: no such object
0-shape: no such object
0-bpf: no such object
0-bpq: no such object
0-hpf: no such object
0-lpf: no such object
0-ega: no such object
0-egr: no such object

@shakfu it's an old patch from my purr data days. It has a bunch of message boxes sending to receive objects with $0- prefixes. $0 in message boxes doesn't fly in vanilla. If you insist I'll endeavor to fix it (gonna take some rerouting...)

Check the s_808* objects in my rc-patches. They are vanilla compatible abstractions but you will need u_loader and u_dispatch from rjlib as well.

Here is an old demo with live guitar and generated drums (no samples): 2009_4-16-11_drum_test.mp3

I used to have a lot of free time and a friend (Damian ala dlib) and I spent a weekend with 808 wav recordings at different knob settings and signal block diagrams for each drum channel. We managed to work out how each was generated and do some basic "analog modeling" in Pd. I think the results are pretty good, although I didn't make the toms and the bell was stolen from Andy Farnell.

I would recommend [Mymembrane~] from Mike Moreno: https://github.com/MikeMorenoDSP/pd-mkmr/tree/master/instruments

@bocanegra no worries. Thanks for the explanation. Looks pretty straightforward to fix then.

@bocanegra I converted your addperc abstraction / demo to vanilla puredata (attached). It was worth the effort because it sounds amazing

addperc-vanilla.zip

@shakfu I'm glad you like it and nice work too! However, check the [pd load] inside the [pd preset] subpatch:

Of course, you could do away with the preset function entirely and rely on programming it with prefixed messages as suggested in the demo file.

As for the algorithm I believe I came up with it when I was trying to synthesize those buddhist singing bowls and realized that both partials and amplitudes can be described with exponential expressions. As it turns out relying on those expressions produces a lot of quasi realistic percussive sounds

Btw - you could ease your rewiring pain by removing the '$0-'s from the messages and feed them through the [pd ctrl] subpatch, which does the routing by prefix trick

Right, so I went and made a thorough overhaul (fixing some bugs I wasn't aware of along the way): addperc_v2.zip
This should be 100% vanilla functional with preset system in place, proper number boxes for typing and no extra abstractions needed. Thanks @shakfu for not only watering my vanity, but also coming up with smart solutions!

It could be improved a lot though. Text import/export for presets and [savestate] implementation comes to mind. A couple of LFOs would be nice too...

@bocanegra Great stuff. Love the rapid iteration. Version 2 vanilla is much better! Thanks for sharing your sweet drum abstractions.

I've had great luck with just using a couple of noise sources through some filters and then 4 osc~ that are setup to FM on another and have each tone's pitch controlled by a Frequency envelope (line~ with a curve function) as well as an amp envelope (line~ again with a curve control). For hats and cymbals I use almost the exact same setup except the osc~ objects are replaced with phasor~ objects and I use simple Bipolar AM ahead of the filtering. Because of the way that the vanilla filters work, you will probably also want to scale the amp as you adjust the q factor.

With this setup I can make pretty much any sound that I can make with microtonal (my favorite drum synth). For extra fun you can run each drum voice in a single sample block sub patch and do some nifty feedback and filtering as well.

@nuromantix be careful with this rimshot patch, it will blow your ears out..do not open!!