Trap Sounds and Production with FM8 Part 1 - The Drums

We welcome back Jonny as he brings us yet another brilliant month-long FM8 video tutorial series. This first lesson is on designing the drum elements for the song that will be produced throughout the process. He does a really good job of breaking down some basic rules of thumb and kicks down some nice pro tips about designing drum sounds in FM8. FM synthesis has long been a favorite amongst sound designers for drum elements in music production.

The FM Matrix is where all the routing happens, and it’s where this lesson begins. Once your basic operators have been routed the envelopes can be set up, which control the bulk of the delivery and development of our sounds. As you can see in the video, the envelope curves are kept short and concise to help ensure that we actually end up with drum-like sounds, rather than short synth notes. Pay close attention to how much affect the envelope has on each sound, and this can be tweaked by turning the Amplitude Envelope knob on each envelope’s window.

After you have successfully followed along with the video and reproduced the sounds, you can begin to program the MIDI information for your drum sequences. Alternatively you can also use the built-in Arpeggiator tool or even the flexible envelope system to create advanced automated sequences that play out as notes are sustained. The choice is yours! As you can see in the examples in the video, there are no limits to what can be made in FM8 and what you can do with those sounds are only limited by your own imagination.

Cheers,
OhmLab