Freesound Forums

This is a sound design challenge.

ElAcHo stands for [El]ectronic [Ac]oustic [Ho]mebased.

You have to create a drum kit using the following rules:
- Acoustic instruments
- Electronic sounds
- Home sounds
- Each drum sound must be a 'composite' (i.e., blend, overlap, layering,...) of at least 2 different from the types listed above (if you get all 3, even better!)
- You can use whatever processing tricks, tools and techniques you want.
- You can use any legal (i.e., no copyright infringement) source for the acoustic and electronic sounds
- The homebased sounds you must record yourself, in your HOME.
- The kit must contain at least the following sounds 1 x bassdrum, 1 x snaredrum, 2 x hat, 1 x cymbal. - You can add more sounds if you like. For example you kit could have 2 bassdrum, 3 x snare, 2 x hat, 3 x cymbal, 3 x tom, 2 x percussion (such as shakers or tambourine sounds) - as long as all the sounds adhere to the rules.
- Post your kit in Freesound as a pack of sounds. Use the tags "drumkit", "ElAcHo" and "Dare-48".

DEADLINE: 30-Jun-2017, 11:59pm

Some suggestions and creativity tips to get you going:
-> Plenty of acoustic instrument sounds at Freesound, also plenty of electronic sounds too. You can use them, but remember to give attribution according to the copyright license of the sounds you have used.
-> Of course, you can record your own acoustic and electronic sounds, if you wish.
-> Why not experiment with some interesting sounds you can obtain from an acoustic instrument? For example: tapping a guitar body or scraping the guitar strings?
-> Of course you can use acoustic drum sounds as the acoustic instrument... but make sure that if you do, your finished sound is substantially different from what you started from.
-> Tape stop and radio static are good sources of raw material sounds for 'drum sound' design
-> The kitchen is a jungle of sounds waiting to be explored!
-> Try layering different sounds. Filtering each sound to limit its frequency range can be a good way to stack multiple elements (low, mid, high frequency).
-> Use pitch shifting. - This can turn a knock on a table into a thunderous 'tom' sound or into a 'click' or 'snap' that could be used to layer on top of other sounds providing the 'click' on a bassdrum or the 'thwack' on a snare.
-> layering is not the only technique. Could you sequence (or juxtapose) sounds? for example, could just the first few miliseconds of the attack from an acoustic guitar strum be positioned at the start of a simple sine wave electronic sound to create the illusion of a percussive sound?
-> Already finished creating all your drum kit sounds with time to spare and getting bored? - Upload a couple of loops created with your drumkit for extra wow factor and bonus points

Okay I'm in!
I have an idea for how to do it. Thats important. A concept.
The sounds are supposed to be "mixed". I.e. the bass drum has to consist of at least two sound.
Am I right?
Anyway I will do this in "two takes".
The process is quick.
A video will explain what I mean.

Almost done...
Have upload to freesound also... Not now.
But here is the video!
https://youtu.be/O9y0NaxHX_Q

Yep, each drum piece needs to be made up of a combination of at least 2 different sounds from different types. - so you can't mix 2 electronic sounds for example.

a bump for this dare!!!

gis_sweden wrote:
Almost done...
Have upload to freesound also... Not now.
But here is the video!
https://youtu.be/O9y0NaxHX_Q

This is great - and a good video to inspire others also on how to get 'made sounds' and combine them to create drum sounds - which is the whole idea of the dare.

Really recommend the video. I guess it is only 2 min long, if that, but really inspiring.
Anyone can do what you did - AND if you don't have a modular, just grab some pre-made synth sounds from Freesound. That is why they are there!

Yeah! Finally!
Drumkit uploaded.

https://www.freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/packs/22246/

Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to El Nacho Drumkit
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/packs/22277/

copyc4t wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to El Nacho Drumkit
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/packs/22277/

Thanks for the humour! And what a fantastic drum kit!
It is really impressive
a) the amount of processing / history some of those sounds have had - the electronic component of the sounds have been recycled from sounds posted for previous dares.
b) how good the sounds actually are! - You could easily have passed these for recordings of actual drums. Especially the toms.

Thanks for participating and well done!

AlienXXX wrote:

Hey copyc4t!

Thanks for the humour! And what a fantastic drum kit!
It is really impressive
a) the amount of processing / history some of those sounds have had - the electronic component of the sounds have been recycled from sounds posted for previous dares.
b) how good the sounds actually are! - You could easily have passed these for recordings of actual drums. Especially the toms.

Thanks for participating and well done!

The kit ideally could have been curated further, but I've been quite short on time and didn't want to miss the deadline

copyc4t wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to El Nacho Drumkit

gis_sweden wrote:

copyc4t wrote:
Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to El Nacho Drumkit

Fantastico! Great sounding drum kit

cartoon-friendly tom

I was working on it, or rather, I did work on for a while, long enough to record all the kitchen sounds needed to come up with the acoustic layer, but I still needed to do some editing with synthetic overlays and just never got to it. Now it's too late.

zimbot wrote:
I was working on it, or rather, I did work on for a while, long enough to record all the kitchen sounds needed to come up with the acoustic layer, but I still needed to do some editing with synthetic overlays and just never got to it. Now it's too late.

Well, okay, I finished, and I posted the sounds. I'm after the deadline. But somehow I got my the names of a couple of my tom sounds swapped. I used the editor to change the file names and descriptions, but it will presumably take many hours for the differences to take effect.

zimbot wrote:
Well, okay, I finished, and I posted the sounds. I'm after the deadline. But somehow I got my the names of a couple of my tom sounds swapped. I used the editor to change the file names and descriptions, but it will presumably take many hours for the differences to take effect.

I have been busy with many things, including a big DIY project. I will keep the dare open for another week, maybe I will contribute a pack too.

In the meatime, I should post the new dare tonight.

They are pretty easy to find (my stuff never needs moderation any more), and they are tagged properly (oops, I'm only now noticing that we were supposed to create a whole new pack for these, sorry [EDIT: I have moved them to a new pack called "Dare-48 Drum-kit"]). The two files I had to rename do show the renaming, now; but I swear, every time I play all 3 tom sounds in the preview player, two of them always sound almost the same, and the original files did not, so it leaves me kind of wondering if something went wrong. Meh. Nobody is gonna care. Since I have never (ever) made use of a set of samples like this (without them already being inside some sort of sequencer/synthesizer), I really have no idea how these are usually set up. I tried to maximize the amplitude for signal quality, so any use would naturally require setting appropriate volume levels (and hopefully people would be varying that anyway).

The whole set of sounds are these:

Toms: All mostly a wobbly thin plastic salad bowl hit with something, mixed with a bit of noisy down-chirp drum sound from an Analog Box circuit with a bit of impulse thus from another Analog Box circuit (I did some separation of impulse and higher-frequency sounds from the lower-frequency tonal part in order to resample the tonal part to different tones while still overlaying the rest unaltered, but before I was done I did so many things that it probably makes no difference):

TomHigh_PlasticSaladBowlPlusAboxDrum
TomMed_PlasticSaladBowlPlusAboxDrum
TomLow_PlasticSaladBowlPlusAboxDrum
Hi-Hats: shorter-envelopes applied to reverberated sound of a handful of coins being bumped (drop the hand by an inch or so and "re-catch" the coins) -- with a bit of enveloped and filtered white noise from an Analog Box circuit. The coin splat sound is actually the sound from multiple such incidences overlaid atop one another, with any "crescendo" part cut off, reversed, and then overlaid again, to create a sharp attack. I believe I may have added another metallic tap recorded from something else in my kitchen. The "open" one required careful reverberation, and I got just a hint of roughness (to approximate edge contact of open hi hat cymbals) via a complex multi-tap preset in Cool Edit Pro called "fancy reverb", but by the time I was done it was nearly buried (I probably needed to find another way to create the effect to get a more convincing hi hat sound, since this ends up sounding more like any-other generic cymbal, but oh well).

HighHatOpen_FromCoinSplatPlusAbox
HighHatClosed_FromCoinSplatPlusAbox
HighHatClosing200ms_FromCoinSplatPlusAbox I wasn't sure how people normally handle the sound of closing (from open to closed) -- if you wanted to use this, you would have to overlay it to start 200 milliseconds before where you want the peak of the sound to be (and presumably before the end of the open hi-hat sound), wherever that might fall.
Snare: 5-gallon plastic trash can (rounded rectangular shape) being hit with something like a screwdriver -- I believe I had a piece of foil over it and put the Zoom H4n inside (can't remember for certain), but the noise of snare had to mostly come from the overlay from another Analog Box circuit (one I had built long ago and called "super snare", but it involves multiple initial attack bursts at the start that make it almost sound like you are getting room reflections, for better or for worse).

Snare_Less_PlasticTrashBinPlusAboxSuperSnare ("less" of the snare springs noise sound)
Snare_More_PlasticTrashBinPlusAboxSuperSnare ("more" of the snare springs noise sound)
Cymbals: the same coin splat used for hihats -- but in this case sent through multiple reverb effects in Cool Edit Pro to get a nice long sound with some strongly-reinforced peaks in the reverberation coloration; mixed with some output from a rather complex Analog Box circuit that managed to get a bit of that "metallic" ringing sound (it was a technique that I discovered somewhat by accident a while back, so I built a dedicated cymbal circuit to exploit it). I think I added the metallic tapping sound I recorded from something from my kitchen, also, though I can't remember now what it was. Of all these sounds, I like these the best.

CymbalSplash_FromCoinSplatReverbedPlusAboxCym
CymbalLong_FromCoinSplatReverbedPlusAboxCym
Kick (Bass) Drum: only one, also built from the same plastic trash can, but you get very different sounds by hitting it in different places and different portions of it used as the holding or mounting point, so I picked one that seemed suitable; it is overlaid with an Analog Box -generated quick down-chirp covering maybe around 100 Hz down to 20 Hz over a relatively short time interval (to give it a nice thud). The thud was placed just after the initial start of the recorded sound, where that initial part got a nice boost of around 1200 Hz or so (low Q). I can do better on this (and others) if I just create them from scratch in Cool Edit Pro (or Analog Box) without having to use a recording, but the recorded sound has its own quirky character (whether that character is useful or likeable or not is another matter).

KickDrum_PlasticTrashBinPlusAboxChirp

[EDIT: by the way, I had the above arranged as two levels of unordered lists of list items using HTML tags, but all of them were thrown away, along with the per-sound commentary switching to a smaller font. Oh well. I've tried editing, and cannot get it to keep the list item (li) elements, no matter what I try. You just get what you get.]

Hello zimbot

Thanks for the sounds and detailed description here of how they were created.
Don't know why you de-valuing them so much. They sound perfectly useable to me. - The best way to use them would be to load them into some kind of sampler drum-machine (thousands of those about, paid, free and already built into DAWs).

The idea of the dare is, first of all, supposed to be fun. - hope it was.
I think the sounds themselves can be very useful, and I must say I was quite impressed with the results.
But also, the descriptions in the sound files and within this thread could be good references for anyone trying to sound design their own drums (or even something else). A good source of ideas and methods.

Nice sounds zimbot
And I like the descriptive filenames.