Techniques for Snare variation

Fluff

Fluff

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I’m interested to hear what other producers do to introduce a little variation (for the sake of interest) to snares (and other drums) while maintaining the necessary impact & power?

I’ve tried adding & removing snare layers for sections to give a slightly different sound as well as the obvious approach of dropping out the main snare from some fills & sections.

Or maybe I’m just more sensitive to it from listening to a track over & over?

http://soundcloud.com/al-wilson/al-wilson-yeah-man-sc-1

Cheers
 
Velocity-mapping for amplitude and a lil' bit of filtur cutoff too, or tossing some sort of constant LFO that isn't tempo sync for a lil' snip of random to the sound, obviously do it subtly.
 
the problem could be with your drums. i just listened to the track and i think the drums (ESP) were a bit too punchy. layer some breaks (sport, think etc) over. your drums just didnt have enough groove. it's a really cool track i have to say.
this might help
Craggz n Parallel tut

 
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Eternaloptimist said:
the problem could be with your drums. i just listened to the track and i think the drums (ESP) were a bit too punchy. layer some breaks (sport, think etc) over. your drums just didnt have enough groove. it's a really cool track i have to say.
this might help
Click to expand...
Cheers for the advice and feedback will try some of the suggestions. I had gone away from using lots of busy breaks as I thought I wasn't getting enough punch to the drums but sounds like I've gone too far.
 
Maybe experiment with a different snare. I think the punch is just about ok on it imo, maybe lower the volume a tad on it. You could add one or two breaks to find a happy medium. But there's no rule that you need to use extra breaks to fill out the drums. E.g. Rockwell tracks.
 
I add and remove hats shuffles every 16bars.
Create micro silences between kick and snare every now and then.
Move the snare hit in a unexpected time at the end of 8 bars or 16.

Humanize the drums
 
i'd do as said above try some breaks layered on top.......quite low volumn, and play around with each snares velocity.
 
Fluff said:
I’m interested to hear what other producers do to introduce a little variation (for the sake of interest) to snares (and other drums) while maintaining the necessary impact & power?

I’ve tried adding & removing snare layers for sections to give a slightly different sound as well as the obvious approach of dropping out the main snare from some fills & sections.

Or maybe I’m just more sensitive to it from listening to a track over & over?

http://soundcloud.com/al-wilson/al-wilson-yeah-man-sc-1

Cheers
Click to expand...

it sounds good. look out for ear fatigue. your ears will go dead to the frequencies you're listening to and it's tempting to keep boosting those frequencies when doing mixing.

i have a couple techniques i like to do. the drums in your song sounded fine to me so these are just ideas..

add a subtle synthesized sound over top of the drum sounds.

shorten the decay of the sounds to make them tight and punchy and then open them up when the bass line drops. or open them up to reinvigorate the beat.

try not to have any of the drum patterns repeat the exact same way. that's a tough one.
 
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