Snare Drum Model

Snare Drum Model turns your iPhone into a responsive physical instrument. There are no recorded drum samples and no collection of canned hits. Every sound begins from silence and is synthesized in real time, responding to how and where you touch the screen.
Strike the center of the head for a full, focused body. Move toward the edge to excite brighter, asymmetric overtones. Drag across the membrane to produce a roll, or use the brush for a broad, textured sweep made from multiple modeled bristle contacts. Leave a finger on the head to damp its vibration at that exact point. Tap the visible metal hoop for a separate rim voice with its own short, hard collision response.
Choose between five physically modeled drums: piccolo, steel, wood, marching, and field. These are not sample sets or simple equalizer presets. Each configuration changes the behavior of the heads, shell, hoop, air volume, resonance, and snare wires. The piccolo is compact and quick; steel is bright and cutting; wood is warmer and more restrained; marching projects with a taut, disciplined voice; and field offers a deeper body with a longer response.
Play with a stick, brush, rod, mallet, or hand. Each striker has a different contact size, hardness, force curve, and interaction with the membrane. A stick delivers a fast attack and bright rim crack. Rods spread their energy across multiple narrow contacts. The mallet produces a broader, softer impact without disappearing beneath the harder voices. Hand strikes are rounder and less metallic, while the brush has both a distinct tap and a continuous friction response as it moves over the coated head.
Eight independently twistable tuning pegs surround the batter head. Instead of reducing tuning to a single global pitch control, every peg changes the local tension near its position. Uneven tuning can split, shift, and color the membrane’s resonant modes, just as it does on a physical drum. Tighten opposite pegs evenly for a controlled response, or deliberately unbalance the head to find rougher, more complex tones.
The snare mechanism is equally playable. Adjust wire tension from loose and rattling to tight and articulate. Change the modeled snare-band width from one to six inches, altering the number and distribution of wires in contact with the resonant head rather than merely changing the volume of a noise layer. Use the throw-off to disengage the wires completely and hear the drum’s heads and shell on their own.
A fixed internal damper presses against the upper edge of the membrane. Its pressure changes the local decay and modal response, and its visible contact shadow follows the amount of damping being applied. Open it for a freer, longer ring or bring it inward to shorten the head without muting the entire instrument.
Each of the five drum types remembers its own setup. Tuning-peg positions, damper pressure, wire tension, snare-band width, and throw-off state are retained independently, both when switching between drums and when returning to the app later. You can build five distinct instruments instead of repeatedly recreating one shared configuration.
Under the surface, two coupled circular membrane models interact with shell resonances, contact noise, wire damping, and position-dependent mode shapes. The metal hoop remains separate from the playable head, and different strikers excite it with appropriately different hardness and brightness. A limiter completes the signal path while preserving the immediate dynamics of touch.
Snare Drum Model is intentionally direct: one playable surface, a focused set of physical controls, and no sequencer or transport between you and the instrument. Put on headphones or connect your iPhone to a larger system, choose a drum and a striker, tune the pegs, set the wires, and play.
Snare Drum Model is the second in a family of fifteen single-instrument apps. Each one is designed around touch, physical behavior, and sound generated entirely on the device.