shrike

I can get you a quick overview; there’s a lot to cover, but essentially:

They are breaking up the 3 component pieces of a typical snare, meaning what happens physically when you hit a snare with a stick. These represent the different oscillators in operator (and yes you can use any synth to do, operator is just high speed low drag):

Osc 1 = body, IE the meat, and represents the largest vibration on the head of the snare
—this is often a sine wave, but could honestly be anything you want, as long as the fundamental freq pokes through properly

Osc 2 = transient, IE that ~10ms (depending on taste) initial attack of the drumstick hitting the skin of the drumhead
—they use a looped noise (looped so that it replicates the exact same on each hit) for the attack/xans portion, but you could experiment with all kinds of sounds for this component, depending on how far out there you want your snares to sound

Osc 3 = snare buzz or noise, IE at -inf db you’ll have a dry snare, more like a tom than snare, and at 0db you would have the snares engaged and get that white noise after sound, which represents the snares themselves buzzing…the degree to which this happens in your synthesized snare represents how much tension the snares have against the bottom head…lots of subjective possibilities here
—they use a white noise, which is a pretty standard response to get a snare sound; IMO the white noise waveshape is a pretty important piece of the puzzle

The macros are just a nice thing that Live provides so that they can build it all out once and then use it over and over in different tunes, knowing that they want to adjust certain properties on each project

You can get a nice snare sound out of Serum, you really can, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it must sound bangin’ right out of the synth. You really just need to get the above three bits right, and then eq, saturation, compression, etc are your friends in getting a great snare sound. Think of the synth as giving you the uncooked ingredients to a meal, and the effects are the thing that bake it all down into something tasty.

That’s just a quick summary, and if you have more specific questions just ask.

I’ll also say: I used Logic and Cubase for years, and resisted using Live until just a few months ago. The speed and creativity that you can achieve in Live is just unparalleled in those more traditional DAWs (don’t flame, just my opinion). I wish I hadn’t resisted so hard, and the point is that because of the instrument/fx racks that you can build in Live like the ones they built for the drums are SO EFFICIENT, and have changed the game for me.

Hear, hear!

Thank you, Genie, especially for providing this dojo in which to train.

WELL DONE ALL.

Forget, I hope we see you back my young bruv.

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