As some of you may know, I practice sound design a lot, and that includes drum sounds. Kicks and small percussion sounds are simple and easy to create within audiotool, but snares are a bit harder. Currently, I make a small transient and a white noise layer. With enough precise eqing, wavershaper, and other effects, i can make it sound somewhat ok. But nothing like the powerful EDM snares you tend to hear. I have a hunch that white noise isn't proper to use for snares. I have also heard that feedback with the delay works, but whenever I try that, there is a bunch of extra tonality.
If you are well experienced in drum synthesis, I would appreciate a few pointers.
I don't entorely know what type of snare you want but here is how you can make a simple long dubstep snare and a short dubstep snare (I don't know any other snares).
Get a sine or square wave and automate the volume to look like a rectangle but ease the ending so it doesn't just cut out. If you want an extra punchy transient, you can do a very fast pitch automation going from maybe a few octaves up to where you want it to stay. for the white noise, get any sustained white noise and make an automation for the volume that makes a tiny transient at the start, smaller than the sine/square wave. then make the volume go back up when the sine/square wave starts getting softer. For a short snare, make a circular slope down with the volume automation. for the long snare, do the same thing but make that decay end on a higher volume and fade it out. Here are some quick ones that I made. They aren't the best but still (kinda) good: (link is only visible to registered users)
You could reverse engineer this by looking at the waveform of a snare and determining what basic waveform seems to be at the fundamental root of the sound.
An option: square waveform with some sawtooth phase modulation (use the heisenberg), and apply an envelope to the filter that works in a similar way to the pitch envelope of a kick drum. Short, plucky, fast, whatever you want to call it. This is essentially how you can start getting the tone.
Run this into a pulv, add white noise, use the amp envelope to tame the noise layer and blend the two layers together (or you could do the filter envelope here too, for a tighter snare sound). Saturate, compress, add a little reverb to create a more natural sound.
Even when trying to be original and synthesis drums, layering real recordings of drums with the synthetic versions brings much more depth to them and is well worth taking the time to do. Just make sure the layers are tuned together and compliment each other.
Having your snare at a different octave, or perhaps using a 5th or 7th harmonic of the kick, also helps to create a call and response between the two drums. Especially in genres like DnB.
I don't entorely know what type of snare you want but here is how you can make a simple long dubstep snare and a short dubstep snare (I don't know any other snares).
Get a sine or square wave and automate the volume to look like a rectangle but ease the ending so it doesn't just cut out. If you want an extra punchy transient, you can do a very fast pitch automation going from maybe a few octaves up to where you want it to stay. for the white noise, get any sustained white noise and make an automation for the volume that makes a tiny transient at the start, smaller than the sine/square wave. then make the volume go back up when the sine/square wave starts getting softer. For a short snare, make a circular slope down with the volume automation. for the long snare, do the same thing but make that decay end on a higher volume and fade it out. Here are some quick ones that I made. They aren't the best but still (kinda) good: (link is only visible to registered users)