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I was wondering about how people make their snare sounds from those who do it from scratch.

Particularly interested if anyone has any tips on what oscillator waveforms in massive might be a good starting point for a snare sound or if you need to layer it with a sampled real snare.

Also anyone have any tips on how to make snares tail for ages

for long tail try to limit and gate the reverb on the snare. Reverb then limiter then gate to cut it of at a certain point. WIth limiter you bring the whole reverb tail up. FL limiter does all that, it has gain to bring it up, limiter next to it and gate.
you have to experiment to get it right.

Cheers Eridu - I'll give that a try.

this is what i've made after playing with massive for a while: https://www.box.com/s/gkk6qgdq35r9nnbb20q7

i started with a sin/triangle click sound with a short decay envelope and added a noise shot with a slightly longer decay to it, then added some effects (hardclipper, some tube distortion & some reverb)

when synthesizing drums, ITS ALL ABOUT ENVELOPES.

I can produce a natural sounding snare by using 200hz tone and white noise hp around 200. Pretty much everything else will be "shine" as those two will give you THE body of a snare.

Massive has metallic noise intended for percussion. Maybe look at the snare presets and see what they did there.

A simple, very synthetic sound I like is to run a burst of white noise (or bright noise in Massive) into a distortion, then filter out the subbass/bass frequencies and very highs (leaving mids and highs). Possibly add some reverb.

There are three sounds which make up a snare; the note of the drum, which can be a sine wave, the rattle of the snare, which can be some whitenoise, and also the transient when the stick hits the skin (possibly a sine wave like somebody said). These are in longest-to-shortest order. You might have to have the pitches envelope, descending at the end.

Loads of good stuff here - Thanks people. I will experiment with some of these things