How to Make a Layered Snare Drum

It is a fact that layering is a crucial aspect of making any style of music that relies on programmed drum sounds. Designing a single snare drum can be a time-consuming process. This is because you need to use everything from filters, distortions, compressors, and phase aligning. Sometimes, just one sample works well with the other elements in the mix. Therefore, if you find the perfect drum for your record… use it. However, this won't be enough in most cases.  

Snare Drum Designing

In the following tutorial, I will try to demonstrate how to make a solid Dub Step snare using multiple layers. I will try to achieve that significant impact and a fat-sounding snare, for which the Dub Step genre is best known. To make things easier, I will use a Break Tweaker by Izotope. By loading an instance of Break Tweaker into a newly created channel within the SoundBridge: DAW, we can see the initial interface with clean tracks. After entering the generator page of the first track, I will choose a sample mode in the drop-down menu of the generator type window and choose a snare drum sample to start with.  

Following that, I have added a mix of two types of distortion to boost up the harmonics of the snare drum a little bit.  

~Snare Drum layer 1  

To add some extra low end to our snare, I will load another layer. In this case, it will be a sine wave that is pitched down by a few octaves. I strongly feel that tuning it to the song's key is very important. Otherwise, it won't sound right in the mix. Additionally, I will make the sustain and release short to hear this sub-layer only at the very beginning of the layered snare drum. As I said, this adds more to the low-end frequencies area.  

 

Let us hear how this 2nd layer sounds solo and combined with the upper layer.

  

~Sub Bass Layer solo

~Sub Bass layer + Snare Drum layer 1  

Last Touches

Furthermore, as our 3rd and final layer, I will use an 808-like snare drum sample to add more presence in the high-frequency area. If you wish, you can add a noise sample as well. Ultimately, we have the whole frequency spectrum of a snare drum covered. Finally, let's color the snare with some distortion. Here is how the 3rd layer sounds solo and with the other two layers together.  

 

~Snare Drum layer 2  

~Sub Bass layer + Snare Drum layer 1 + Snare Drum layer 2  

To conclude, a bit of Reverb and some compression won't do any harm, so let us hear what the layered snare drum sounds like.  

~Final Layered Snare Drum + Reverb & Compression