The admirable Moritz Klein x Erica Synths .edu analog drum kit includes a kick, snare, and hi-hat, but (so far) no clap. Notes on how to build an MKxES.edu-style clap…

Basic principles

A clap is essentially white-noise, run through a band-pass filter, with a sharp-attack, fast-decay envelope

To make it sound more realistic, you actually want a 3 or 4 these to be trigger with a short time delay then run the result through a reverb. Putting a small random variation on each filter frequency will make it sound more realistc.

  • A hack is to use 2 EG and 1 quick LFO to VCA, to “snap” the “clap” shut before feeding into a delay.
  • Another hack is to make a single 3 triangle envelope on the noise (maybe there’s a simple way to analogue this…)

In the wild