Get the 2hp Snare sample pack for free at Wavparty.

The 2hp modules are popular because they cram solid functionality into a tiny footprint at a good price. They do a great job of giving you CV/manual control of the most important elements of a given module, but at that size there’s just not a lot or room for many knobs or jacks. I’ve always thought of my 2hp Snare as a nice but basic module to generate a pretty narrow spectrum of x0xish snare sounds--until I started sampling it.

It turns out you can do some wild stuff with it, including respectable bass drum sounds. I put together a sample pack of 86 2hp Snare sounds (some dry, many running through filters, a wave folder, and/or other effects) including:

42 snares
21 kick drums (16 of them tuned to C)
9 high hats
8 melodic sounds (tuned to C)
4 percussion sounds
2 claps

This demo track was put together in Ableton Live with a big drum rack and a few instances of Simpler (for the melodic parts). There is a bit of filtering and pitching of samples and some compression/EQ on the master bus, but everything else is dry. Every sound you hear is from the sample pack:


Final thoughts:

  • The short decay time is kind of limiting for kick drums. Not that I’m complaining, it’s crazy that a snare module can even do this.
  • Most of the kicks are beefed up by running them through a wave folder. They’re also a little noisy. Uh, just embrace the grunginess.
  • I’m very OK with the inherent tradeoffs of the 2hp modules, but MAN is it hard tuning sounds with that tiny pitch knob.
  • I’m planning on doing this for some other drum modules. I started with this module because it was supposed to be easy, just a few snares, right?
  • This blog is a static Jekyll site hosted on Netlify so I wanted to figure out a good way to outsource file downloads. I’m trying out Gumroad with a pay-what-you-want price that defaults to $0. We’ll see.
  • sox is the best