Adding 'Weight' To Your Snare Hits

[Formant024]

Also note that its quick to hit a trade off in regards to transcients and headroom opposed to blatantly squashing for loudness. This also accounts for layering samples unless its a matching top/bottom snare and well aligned to keep those transcients alive.
One good snare sample with a healthy gain will achieve more loudness during mastering then overcompressing.
In the analog drum domain you hardly(or not at all) need to use compression or eq if you know how to program the drumsynth.

It is perfectly possible to achieve a grainy/grimey drumsound with good and fast transcients, it just takes experience and use of the plain old mixing ethics. Like stated before, people compromise their lack of understanding how to balance a good mix to fix a "master" or other factors beneficial to gain a good result.

 

[God]

Dacalion is correct. Adding a form of bass on the snare works.

What also works:

I) Adding different snare sounds together and mixing them into one snare sound.

II) Take one of your existing snare and copy and pasting the wave file of the snare track across three separate tracks:

a) Name one of the identical snare track "lows," one track "mids" and one "highs."

b) Then EQ the track called "lows" by cutting out all the mids and highs.

c) Use EQ to cut off the lows and highs for the "mids" track.

d) Use EQ to cut off the lows and mids for the "highs" track.

e) Play the song and mix the different tracks attributed to the different EQ's of the snare track and lower the mids, or adjust accordingly to whatever sounds good for you.

f) This is the Bob Clearmountain method of mixing a sound by slicing the wave event into multiple tracks and mixing accordingly.

g) This way also helps you remove any unwanted overlap from the bass as recommended by Dacalion.

 

[Relic]

^^ Hooooly shit..... MJ is alive....

 

[Formant024]

divine intervention!!!

Not to confuse a muthaf but with bass i assume you mean a low freq boost.
Why doesnt Bob Clearmountain use 3 mics instead ? With a mic'd setup you'd have top/bottom/overhead already and i cant imagine hes using one mic due to possible misalignment.

 

[God]

divine intervention!!!

Not to confuse a muthaf but with bass i assume you mean a low freq boost.
Why doesnt Bob Clearmountain use 3 mics instead ? With a mic'd setup you'd have top/bottom/overhead already and i cant imagine hes using one mic due to possible misalignment.

Miking a snare drum with three mics is ineffective. A lot of modern rock uses samples to replace the sound events of the actual snare drum anyway. It's easier and saves time (and money) in production to do it this way.

 

[Step Soprano]

Dacalion is correct. Adding a form of bass on the snare works.

What also works:

I) Adding different snare sounds together and mixing them into one snare sound.

II) Take one of your existing snare and copy and pasting the wave file of the snare track across three separate tracks:

a) Name one of the identical snare track "lows," one track "mids" and one "highs."

b) Then EQ the track called "lows" by cutting out all the mids and highs.

c) Use EQ to cut off the lows and highs for the "mids" track.

d) Use EQ to cut off the lows and mids for the "highs" track.

e) Play the song and mix the different tracks attributed to the different EQ's of the snare track and lower the mids, or adjust accordingly to whatever sounds good for you.

f) This is the Bob Clearmountain method of mixing a sound by slicing the wave event into multiple tracks and mixing accordingly.

g) This way also helps you remove any unwanted overlap from the bass as recommended by Dacalion.

Exactly what guru taught me. He does this for his kicks and pianos too.

 

[JDarmsMusic]

I sometimes add a tom under my snare. Very low db but still it can make it sound rounder.

 

[Dakiddv]

This is something I did before. Just bring out the LF and it will give it that harder hitting drum. Also another good thin to do is later your drums just make sure to eq them the right way. Sometimes I would do USB that people say don't just to hear the result, you never know til you try right? Lol

 

[2GooD Productions]

Sometimes I would do USB that people say don't just to hear the result, you never know til you try right? Lol

You lost me there. What do you mean by do USB?

 

[Iron Keys]

The whole low/mid/high/nextamountoflayers thing I used to do ageees ago when I first got into producing.

At current, I feel it's slightly unnecessary. I think it should be more about your production choices.

What I mean by this, is if you want some huge crashing snare, or some pretty dominant kick, you gotta realise that these are going to require a nice chunk of room (in the freq spectrum) to do so.

You gotta think about what else is going on in that track when the snare(or whatever) hits. And you gotta produce with this in mind... if you're having several elements hit exactly when the snare(or whatever) does, you've got to make sure your original sound selection is aligned with this idea.

If you choose your elements in the right way, when it comes to the mix, it *should* be a much simpler process, as your elements are set up to work with eachother.


Just my input for now.

Holla

Love

 

[Formant024]

^^^well put, to me layering is fixing a mix with a hammer lol

 

[Iron Keys]

On a similar note...

The way you mix a track, can make a seemingly lacklustre drum channel come to life, depending on the way you compress and how you shape the dynamics of your track.

By this I don't mean "once you slam your drums hard through a compressor and crush them to death - urika!" I mean, the way you get your compressor to pump or behave and the way you get other elements to behave, can make your drum (kick/snare whatever) pop out in the mix. As opposed to 'my kick doesnt cut through, lets pile a million kicks on top of it'.

If your kick is hitting on the same beat as your snare, you can even cut your snare up to 1000hz n shit is all good, it sounds weighty.

If you make good production choices, the mix and mix choices should be a lot simpler, and any problems you do run into at the mix stage, are likely more easily sorted.

 

[God]

On a similar note...

The way you mix a track, can make a seemingly lacklustre drum channel come to life, depending on the way you compress and how you shape the dynamics of your track.

By this I don't mean "once you slam your drums hard through a compressor and crush them to death - urika!" I mean, the way you get your compressor to pump or behave and the way you get other elements to behave, can make your drum (kick/snare whatever) pop out in the mix. As opposed to 'my kick doesnt cut through, lets pile a million kicks on top of it'.

If your kick is hitting on the same beat as your snare, you can even cut your snare up to 1000hz n shit is all good, it sounds weighty.

If you make good production choices, the mix and mix choices should be a lot simpler, and any problems you do run into at the mix stage, are likely more easily sorted.

You would be surprised at how the stuff you say may make sense to you, but in a setting with a professional mixer, they will try to figure out ways to get as much control over the frequencies of different musical tracks within the song. But I guarantee most of the time, when you hand off your track to get professionally mixed that pro mixer will probably split all your tracks and mix the stuff in the way I said. It's just easier to control the different frequencies of the mix that may cause issues in the track with a vocal or other thing.

If you sat in a studio with some of these professional guys for the 8 hours they sit there mixing your track, you will see the faders move up and down throughout the song on a damn hi-hat or triangle, with intense thought put into that hi-hat or triangle track. Mixing requires a lot of attention. Splitting tracks gives you more control so you can hand off a really polished version of the song to the mastering engineer.

I don't disagree with you, but to do it right-- you have to have control over the different tracks and be able to "tuck in" or "push" frequencies in different areas of the song based on the frequencies of other tracks, since a song is essentially a symbiotic relationship defining the collusion of different frequencies that create a melodic output through the harmonies created by those frequencies.

 

[Iron Keys]

Just for the heads up, I've shadowed a few professional engineers so I've seen a lot of different ways they choose to do things.

A side reason to my post above was that too many people can be drawn into the 'processing for the sake of processing' trap, something I used to do a lot. I'll only split something if I need to. If I need to do something to the top end of a bass, but something that wouldn't be good for the bottom end, and such other things. But I find it much more efficient to roll with the track, no point splitting things up and shit before you see if they even *really* need it. You can mess shit up by trying to add/do things it doesn't need.

Of course I'm sure you know I'm not saying that's something you or the people you've learnt from do, however it's a huge trap for people to think they *must* do something this way.

 

[HotBeats4Less]

I think we should be carefull of using these tips just for the sake of using.. I made this mistake for sooooo long... if a read or saw a video on mixing I would have proceed and applied every step on all my future tracks,, regardless until I learn or saw the next tip and so on and so on......

In HIP HOP and Urban music a lot of the rules... where never applied... since its was never created by Bands, using multiple drums mics.. etc. etc... so while all the advice are GOOD... it can be overkill specially without experience.


http://wwww.hotbeats4less.com
http://www.twitter.com/HotBeats4Less

 

[Formant024]

In HIP HOP and Urban music a lot of the rules... where never applied... since its was never created by Bands, using multiple drums mics.. etc. etc... so while all the advice are GOOD... it can be overkill specially without experience.

http://wwww.hotbeats4less.com
http://www.twitter.com/HotBeats4Less

Add to it that there is no difference in technique between genres. The rules were "never" applied because its a bedroom tech domain in the first place where the demand for using the proper technique < making it sound good on in an environment that wasnt proper in the first place.

A lot of cats are just compensating for what they cant hear.

 

[dacalion]

To me its the 'glass half full - glass half empty' scenario...you can't be creative without breaking the rules or else you are following everybody elses footsteps...I stand on the 'do you' side, if you want to layer and it sounds good to you, then layer it...if you dont care for layering, dont layer...everybody is gonna have a different opinion on certain things but thats what makes hip hop what it is. Think of all the producers who gained recognition for stepping out of the box and think of those that stayed in...success can be found on both sides of the coin.

If you send your beat to a professional mixer and he cant do his magic on your layered snare, then you have a few options...you can fix it or find another pro mixer and see if he can do anything with it. I just like the idea of being creative versus doing what someone else tells you is right or wrong.

If youre nowhere in the ballpark the pro mixer will tell you and you should probably listen, but stay creative either way.