4.00: HANDCLAPS
The ubiquitous TR808 clap is generated from analogue circuitry; but sadly, creating your own sounds from a monosynth alone is very difficult, as the TR808 clap is more complex than it appears.
The sound can be viewed as the result of lots of people clapping nearly all at once, and is actually produced on the TR808 by passing white noise through a band-pass filter. Two envelopes are used on a VCA; one is a repeating sawtooth-shaped envelope, to produce the 'lots of people clapping nearly all at once' sound, while the other envelope has a long decay to produce the reverb. Using this principle, a usable sound can be created on the MS20 (see example 4.1), but most monosynths are not flexible enough to make the sound work unaided. At a push, several bursts of white noise with a long decay through an HPF may do the trick. If you're prepared to add some effects and processing, however, you can make something usable quite easily from a snare patch; what you're after is a basic snare sound made almost entirely from filtered noise, with no real note to it.
The first step is to heavily EQ the sound by cranking up the mid boost control on your desk as far as it will go (don't use mole grips for this!) and then adjusting the frequency until you get a nice aggressive snap. As you tune through the EQ, you'll get to a point where the patch sounds like a techno snare or exploding champagne cork. If you keep pushing the frequency up, you'll move into the clapping region. If you go too far, you'll lose the snap and end up with a thin edge to the sound, but as every EQ behaves differently, it's best to do this by ear rather than try to follow any figures I might give you.
At this point, you have a single and none too convincing clap, but there are several ways of turning this sound into a thick ensemble, the first and easiest of which is to feed it through a gated reverb patch. Gated reverbs are actually short bursts of closely spaced reflections which neatly simulate a multitude of almost-in-time hands. You may also find that deliberately overdriving the reverb input makes the sound even more authentic.
If you don't have a gated reverb, try a short plate reverb with around 80ms of pre-delay, and if you don't have a reverb unit at all, use a digital delay to add one or more delays in the 50 to 100ms region. If you don't have a delay, but you're working with a sequencer and your analogue synth can be MIDI-controlled, simply copy the handclap track two or three times onto new tracks and delay the copies to create the ensemble effect. Again, delays between 50 and 100ms should work fine. If this seems a lot of trouble to go to, you could always just set it up once and sample it!
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