Control Your Drum Roll Build Ups in a Different Way

In modern genres of electronic music, drum sounds play a crucial role. We have previously covered numerous techniques that show you how to mix, tame possible harshness, or accent them properly. Drum roll build-ups are an essential part of House music. Using a couple of tools, we will make a solid snare drum roll that transitions smoothly into the whole mix. So, let's begin!  

Snare Drum Roll Build-Up

Firstly, we will choose a snare drum sample and place it in the newly selected audio track within the SoundBridge: DAW. Let's hear the initial sample.  

~Snare Drum 1

Next, we will multiply our snare drum to create a so-called roll. At the same time, every other multiplied sample will be decreased by -5 dB and gradually speeded up in order to create a more exciting groove sequence. Let us hear it again.  

~Snare Drum roll 1  

Transient Shaper

In order to make it more interesting, we will use a couple of tools we already mentioned above. Those tools would be a transient shaper, a reverb, and, in the end, some pitch automation. The first one, a transient shaper, will be used to control the decay and sustain of the snare drum sample. This will be done in order to get that gradual increasing of the snare drum roll energy. In the picture below, you can see that we used a simple plugin called Transient Shaper by Native Instruments, but again, you can use any other brand of this type of plugin since there are plenty of those out there.  

~Snare Drum roll 1 + Transient Shaper

Reverb

Next, we will spice it up with the reverb effect. In this case, we have to use our reverb effect that is coming together with the SoundBridge: DAW. After setting the reverb time and other parameters, we will automate the wet signal. Let's hear how that sounds.  

~Snare Drum roll 1 + Transient Shaper and Reverb  

Pitch Automation

The final touch to this snare drum roll would be to introduce a bit of pitch-shifting towards the end of the build-up in order to get that speeding-up kind of feeling. We will do that by using another simple plugin that controls the resonance. Still, by automating the main parameter of it gradually to the max, it created a kind of pitch shifting. This plugin is called Torque, and Waves Audio makes it. For the sake of this tutorial, we have chosen Torque, but other options are available on the market as well. So let's hear the snare drum roll processed like this.  

~Snare Drum roll 1 + Transient Shaper, Reverb, and Torque

Ultimately, it is time to hear how our snare drum roll sounds, followed by a full mix.

~Full Mix