Snares

w3st26

New Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Just wanted to give some advice on making snares sound better and more full (probably more for beginners) and might have been a really obvious thing for most people but I only figured this out last night after many years of producing. Getting my drum to sound how I want them has always been a problem for me... trying to bridge that gap between electronic and live sound. I tought it would be nice to share things as I learn them so that somebody else can also hopefully benfit from my lessons along the circuit.

This is just a little tip to get the snares sounding a little more "full" by layering.

The obvious thing to do is to pick out a high (clap) a mid and a lower snare layer them on top of each other.
Now the trick is to set them all slightly off from each other rather than have them all hitting at the same time if you get my drift.

have your low snare just before where you want the snare to drop.. talking like milliseconds (it makes a difference and leave it as it is... the mid snare you want on the drop point and use a little volume (on logic apple key & A) automation to take out some of the volume of the hit/attack at the start and then layer the high snare/clap just a bit in front of the mid snare again milliseconds but it makes a difference and automate the attack again so it's not quite as harsh or noticeable.

Hopefully if it's done right you will find that your snares sound a lot more full and real/crisp rather than muddy and will lose a bit of that typical electronic sound. Probably more useful in liquid type production rather than jump up/neuro.

I know you can buy real drum samples and sample from live drums but I just feel that this way gives you more control over the sound. Hope this helps someone anyway and feel free to add any more tips about getting those snare drums sounding good and professional!
 
Pro-tip:

If you're making a sampler instrument and you want to make your beats sound more human, take your sample and make copies of it, except for each sample add incrementally increasing amounts of extra blank audio before the hit itself. Map the longest delayed sample with the lowest velocity level and then make the delay shorter with increases in velocity.

This makes the drum have a much more natural swing when quantized by nature that a lower velocity snare hit will be moving at a...lower velocity, i.e. it hits the drum slightly later then if the hit was initiated with more muscle force.
 
Theres loads of other things you could do aswell......Add a bit of white noise on top.....trim it to size, and lower the volumn to suit.

Reverb?
Layer with claps...or use claps instead of snares.
 
i like dynamic processing on a snare that I find punchy and layered like said above, and then reprocessing to taste and punchiness.

I then like to transient shape and remove release and either create a hi cut reverb send channel to mix the dry snare with the send verb or add a hi end splashy snare or ride on the snare with the enveloping as said above again.

its all about experimenting really tho
 
What really helped me were the two new ARTFX tutorials on drum processing
and
.
Hope those are helpful! :D

But yea, experimenting is the key.
 
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Satson + Pro-Q + Camelphat = Insta-fat snare.

Also to add to this.....

If you get your snare layers all prepped and eq'd and ready for using then export them. Pitch it up and use a pitch envelope sloping downwards be quite abrupt with it, get rid of the unnecessary pitched down tail by taking the sustain off and only having a little bit of decay. This can create a very tight snap to any snare, works on kicks too. Just be sure to then eq it again as you may of created some unnecessary low frequencies?



Originally this is how we used to process all of our drums, not just pitch envelopes but filter envelopes too! Slowly getting back to doing it as you can get some nice results with that method of processing.
 
3 snares tend to cloud the mix and interfere best to stick at 2 max, the beast em up with slight distortion and overdrive/ eq out lows boost mids
 
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