You can get a decent snare drum out of Karplus-Strong. The description begins on p.46 of their article: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1

You can get a decent snare drum out of Karplus-Strong. The description begins on p.46 of their article: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.144.5585&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.144... It is really cheap to implement -- you can use a shift-xor random bit generator to get the blend factor of ½ that they mention. The whole thing was about 10 8086 instructions, as far as I recall (it's been twenty years since I played with it). Here's a paper with more extensions to the Karplus-Strong algorithm (+ analyses thereof): http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/courses/papers/Jaffe-Extensions-CMJ-1983.pdf http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/courses/papers/Jaffe-Extens... Here's an anthology from 1992, which is where I learned about Karplus-Strong: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Machine-Selected-Readings-Computer/dp/0262680785/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1433163352&sr=8-1&keywords=the+music+machine+curtis+roads http://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Machine-Selected-Readings-Comp...