Idioteque by Radiohead - Snare Drum Sound

[Liney]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7qJ6cb3S8s

I've always loved the drum sound on this track.

I haven't tried to reproduce them yet, but I thought I'd just make the most of the knowledge on here before I do.

Specifically the snare sound. I know how to to make a conventional snare sound using subtractive synthesis (pitch swept sine wave for the weighty stick hit, plus filtered noise with a longer decay for the wire/rattle sound). Does the snare in this track have a stick sound, or is it all white noise? And is it filtered and/or compressed in a specific way? Also, is reverb the key to this particular sound?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

[dangayle]

Live, it gets a lot bigger and heavier (especially with two drummers), but the album drums come from Jonny's modular synth. Would be interesting to try to create it.

[cron]

One thing that jumps out here is that there's fairly harsh distortion/uber-compression over the whole drum track. If you listen at points where the noise snare and kick overlap, you can hear the noise duck and 'break up' as the kick overloads the channel.

Trying and failing to get that lovely noise timbre here. It sounds like it should be a simple high/band pass on white noise, but I wonder if there are some peculiar formants in there. There's a really nice 'openness' to it. Might dig out my copy of Kid A and have a look at it in the spectrum analyser.

[Liney]

Cheers for the feedback Cron and dangayle. I was worried everyone would just say 'that's simply white noise you idiot - duh!'

[BertKoor]

Also, is reverb the key to this particular sound?

I'd definitely say so, yeah... The reverb is the key. The snare sound itself is rather short and low, but the reverb supplies a long decay and more shizzly sound in the higher mids.