In this tutorial
My notes from this video
The basics are a punch and a noise, combined. LFO 1 on envelope mode controls oscillator A, the punch, and LFO 2 controls the noise, both with a really fast attack. Send LFO 1 to the pitch as well, so when the volume goes down the pitch goes down too. I use coarse pitch instead of semitone, because it goes smoothly and you get more variations out of it.
With a macro on the rate of each envelope, punch length and noise length, you can create a lot of different snares with this setup only.
The snare frequency is really around a thousand hertz. The low mids, not the high mids per se, are where the snare really comes to life, so give that range a really big boost in the EQ. Cut the bass as well, but really don't go further than 200 hertz, because there's a lot of character in there.
The best trick is Serum's filter on reverb. It really gives character to the snare. Put a macro on the cutoff so you can really tweak the snare, dampen it and take down the mix. If you really open up the reverb filter, you could even say you get these really big dubstep snares.
If the snare isn't clicky enough, send an envelope with a really fast attack to the master tune, the pitch of the whole plugin. That adds a really fast pitch attack, which really sounds like a click. Set the amount to 36 semitones, three octaves, so it stays in pitch. Take down the decay until there's a clicky attack at the beginning.
My clipping ceiling is the Kilohearts transient shaper, a soft clipper and an inflator, in the bottom three slots of the mixer. Usually people add stuff on the top first. I work from the bottom to the top, so whatever effects I put in later end up in these three plugins, and they will always clip your stuff nicely.
Add attack on the transient shaper, that's where you really get the punch in your snare. If you don't have the inflator, add a wave shaper on half sine mode after your soft clipper.
FL Studio·Serum·Kilohearts Transient Shaper·Fruity Soft Clipper·Sonnox Oxford Inflator·Fruity Compressor·Waves CLA-2A·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·Kilohearts Frequency Shifter·Kilohearts Pitch Shifter·Misstortion 2·LFOTool·Fruity Convolver·Edison
Fire DnB Snares
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