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?

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!!