Has anyone got any tips for making nice snares, anything outside of the obvious?
I find when I’m making a beat on the M:C the snare is the element I’m least happy with, the machine has a slightly strange “tonal” quality to it often so I end up just using short decay + reverb, but it sounds a bit weak. Any sweet spots or tricks to try? Maybe using other machines in unintended ways?
I’m mostly making electronic/techno, but interested in any thoughts!
Use two snares layered
check my elektro pattn on the “model:cycles only music” thread
Got a link? Can’t see it in there
I’m so anti youtube I only post syx these days
EDIT: DISC,AIMER: utube is aight but some aspects of it seem silly to me
Ahhh OK! I’ll install it later 
yeh so in the pattn tracks 2 & 4 form the composite snare sound. By reshaping the two layers there’s a lot of range for snare variations. Try altering the decaus of T2 & T4 for the overall envelope if desired.
Its a similar idea than when micing an acoustic snare basically. You have top and bottom “mics” and you blend the two for your final snare mix. One layer gives the body (T2) and the other gives the smack (T4).
EDIT: Just tried swapping out the snare body layer… try it on PERC, you can get even meatier and lower bodies 
Interesting idea, I’ll give this a go for sure! Thanks!
I agree that Snare machine on Cycles is not your typical snare right out of the box, which IMO is good and triggers experimentation, you can affect it in many ways to sound varied (also more standard-ish):
enabling punch effect
lowering volume through level / data knob while also raising volume through volume + dist knob past 70
using perc instead of snare
adding superfast lfo with some good destination
enabling gate / raising decay
layering trigs, like was mentioned already
a combination of all the above
also you can change the note on snare machine (by playing chromatically / using pitch knob / using level/data knob to pick a certain note)
Lovely stuff, I’ll play with these tonight! Forgot how much punch can change things. Thanks!
Funny think is: I sooo love the Snare sounds I get out of the Cycles. Is sound like RHCP in their early funk era! But its definitively not a typical snare I would use in a techno track.
Yeah I’m reading through the “Sucky Kick” thread it gave me ideas for layers. On another machine (that I shall not mention because I have reached my quota for the day) each channel has 2 layers and sometimes that is not enough. If you can’t do it in 4 layers you may be approaching it wrong or it just can’t be done on that machine.
One for body - maybe the tone machine pitched up but still leaving the transient body and with an extremely short decay and layer with the metal machine which could have a slightly longer decay for the brightness / metallic ring of the top end.
Pair that with a slow LFO and very slight depth per channel - routed to whatever makes sense to give the sound some organic movement and you may be in business!
I learned a lot from these articles -
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/synthesizing-drums-snare-drum
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/practical-bass-drum-synthesis
Sure you use two machines but it’s the end result that counts right?
Now we need a Clap Tips thread 
- retrig seems to be the key here maybe along with layers.
I think its totally OK to use two tracks for a single sound if its front and center in the pattern. You still have four to use for everything else.
Same applies also for m:s where its not a bad combo to use 4 mono and 1 stereo track instead of 6 mono tracks. Use that double track expenditure for something tasty, like a stereophonic ambience or whatever that adds flair to the stereo field.
For more classic sounding snares I preffer the volca drum, these two machines complement each other very well.
I do not understand people selling the VD after getting the cycles, 2 very different machines. 12 drum synth voices and more for less than 500€
^^^^ THIS ^^^^
Definitely never selling mine