Collaborative Drum Kit in Max

Drums and rhythm are a foundational element of electronic music especially, and every artist has their preferences in how they should sound. Drum voices can also be a fun sound design challenge for Max patching. For this community project, we invited four artists to each create their unique take on a classic kick, snare, hi-hat, or tom voice, along with a sequencer that puts this whole collection into action.

Sequencer - glia

"UKEM is a four-channel density sequencer for drums. Control pattern size, probability & density of triggers using faders within the patch." - glia
Find glia on Instagram and Bandcamp
Note: The sequencer patch download includes all of the patches listed below.

Kick - Tom Hall

“I consider the Kick drum to be the foundation of a lot of music, perhaps not the leader, but the foundation. Over the years I’ve spent too many days, months, and years working on designing Kick drums that ended up overly convoluted. What I love about the new additions to Max 8.3 is that I was able to make a simple Kick drum patch that one can coax a variety of Kick styles from with just eight objects. Have fun!” - Tom Hall

Find Tom Hall on Instagram and online at tomhall.xyz

Snare - Ned Rush

"This snare takes the classic model and adds a few new ideas, such as some FM on the body to add a bit of crack, and rather than white noise, random frequencies can be dialled high for the classic sound, or low for some digital crunch. A filter is included to add more tone." - Ned Rush
Find Ned Rush on Instagram

Hi-Hat - Leslie García

"My approach to designing this hit hat synth is based on the use of noise object as generator and curve to produce an envelope. Then play around with some classic hi-pass filter by integrating two possibilities the onepole~ and lores~ which adds some resonance control. I'm using the filtergraph because it's a beautiful piece of gui and finally add some craziness with a ping pong delay." - Leslie García
Find Leslie García on Instagram

Tom - Too__Hands

"I wanted to make some toms that could emulate the bouncy chaos of an over-caffeinated drummer playing the 3 toms on a small pawn shop drum kit, but with options for extra randomness and dirt. I also wanted it to be able to just be a single simple tom. I just started learning Max and I've mostly built sample-driven patches, so this one made me stretch. Big hugs to Tony Obr for the feedback, cheat codes, and sage advice, like: you can never have too many multiplication tildes." - too__hands

Find @too__hands on Instagram