Once so maligned that the musicians’ unions took them to task, synthesised drums are a staple of modern music. Here’s how to program your own using the cm Plugin Suite…

Synthesised drums are such an integral part of today’s music that it’s hard to believe they were once so controversial. In the 80s, drummers were convinced that the bang-on perfection of the drum machine threatened their very livelihoods, and the Musicians’ Union responded by calling for a ban on both synths and drum machines. Obviously the idea didn’t take, and drum machines have since proliferated in ways the Union could never have predicted. Maybe they should have consulted Phil Collins or Warren Cann - both of whom cracking drummers who had no problem embracing the drum machine.

Mind you, Collins and Cann were sharing the stage with quaint analogue drum machines that emitted the kind of hissing, clattering sounds that could never have been mistaken for the real thing. By 1982, however, Roger Linn’s sample-based LinnDrum was in its second incarnation, and other manufacturers were following suit with machines designed specifically to alleviate the need for a drummer.

The Union needn’t have worried, though - it turns out drummers aren’t just good for being the butt of punchlines and stealing the singer’s girlfriend, but are essential for giving the drums a truly human feel as well. Nonetheless, the drum machine eventually went through almost exactly the same revival as the analogue synthesiser did.

When sampling took over, cash-strapped musicians snapped up obsolete analogue drum machines for pennies, incorporating them into then-innovative hip-hop, industrial and synth-pop records, not to mention using them to define the sound of mid-80s goth. Sooner or later, people gradually began to realise that the very artificial quality that was initially seen as a liability was, in fact, a supremely evocative sound in its own right.

Luckily, the sounds made by those old machines can be reproduced so you don’t need to splash out thousands on a second-hand TR-808 if you have access to a half-decent synthesiser. Over the next few pages, we’ll show you how easy it is to create your own classic drum machine sounds using some great synth plugins from the cm Plugin Suite (at filesilo.co.uk) and that stalwart of freeware synths, Crystal.

Machine and soul

Analogue drum machines were plentiful in the 70s and early 80s, ranging from the initial pre-programmed accompaniment add-ons and built-ins to the now classic purpose-built beat boxes made by Roland et al. Virtually all of them produced their sounds via the same methods, which were culled from analogue synthesis. The basic drum sounds used for kicks, toms and other timbres were derived from filters with high resonance levels. These filters could be excited with a short, percussive envelope that would push them over the brink into self-oscillation. This is very similar to the method we will be using in our tutorials, the one difference being that software synthesisers often lack self-oscillating filters. No matter, though - we can make them work all the same.