How to Mix Snare Drum

hey this is joe from home studio corner today we're going to talk about how to mix snare drum this is certainly not the only way to mix snare but it's worked well for me and i want to share it with you it comes in two parts compression and eq i'm going to talk about both for a minute then i'll play you some examples and by the way before we can dive in the most important piece to this entire puzzle is that we start with a good sounding snare drum recording get it right at the source am i right okay let's dive in our first stop compression if i like the sound of the raw snare drum track the first thing i'll reach for is a compressor now a common question is okay how much compression should i use a better question would be where do i set my attack and release settings quick overview the attack setting has to do with how quickly the compressor clamps down on the signal once it crosses the threshold it's measured in milliseconds and it generally deals with the first half of the waveform the release setting of the compressor has to do with how quickly the compressor lets go of the signal it's also measured in milliseconds and it tends to deal with the last half of the waveform at least with short waveforms like a snare drum now you probably already knew that part but can you tell me what the attack and release settings sound like when we start adjusting them i've got two nonsense words for you today the k sound has to do with the attack setting of the compressor how much of the k sound are we letting through if it's a short attack then it's going to go if it's a longer attack it might go does that make sense so the same word so if the first part of a snare sound is the sound k the attack is telling us how much of the k sound we're letting through now on to the wah sound after the k comes the wah so stupid this will make sense in just a second after you compress the sound the snare drum as it's releasing gives sort of a wah sound now how quickly that wah sound happens is determined by the release setting a very short release meaning a small number small number of milliseconds it'll go come right back but a longer release setting will have a longer wah sound so it'll go it'll kind of swell back into existence this may go down in history as the dumbest tutorial video but we're going to stick with it let's listen to a raw snare drum recording then we'll add a compressor now the engineer on this session did add a gate to the track before he sent it back to me so it's got some gating on the end not gonna hurt us here we're still gonna learn a lot so i'm going to drag just the stock compressor in studio one here onto the channel now if we just set this to like four to one it really doesn't matter that much four to one ratio will set the the need to something like that and now i'm going to turn on the auto gain control so as i make adjustments to the settings the volume won't change dramatically which will help us hear what's actually happening tonally on the compressor so right now my default settings for attack and release are 30 milliseconds and 50 milliseconds we'll leave it there for now and the first thing we'll do is bring the threshold down just to make sure some compression is happening okay it's compressing and we know that because this little gain reduction meter is pumping down every time the snare hits how much compression again i don't really care what i care more about is the attack and the release so first let's leave the release where it is and let's mess with the attack as you make a shorter attack it's gonna sound like there's more compression happening because we're grabbing on to the signal faster and faster so let's bring it from 30 milliseconds down to something like one millisecond listen to what happens to the snare tone because it's pretty dramatic [Music] as we raise that attack setting we're adding more of that initial sound of the snare drum in so it gets a little snappier there's more of the k happening if we go up to like 100 milliseconds there's a lot of that coul happening very punchy um but if we want to make it a little bit tighter a little bit shorter we bring the attack down and we get like a snappier tighter sound you can hear it it's like going it's being squished down okay so let's do that let's stick with something like i really do like around 20 milliseconds that sounds pretty good to me it's got kind of the right balance of snap and punch i like that now let's go to the release the wah of the sound let's go with uh let's start here at 50 milliseconds where it is and let's go first for the longer release let's go up to like a second of release like literally 1000 milliseconds and see what that sounds like you'll notice it's everything gets quieter you have the attack of the snare drum and then the rest of the sound gets really quiet kind of a cool sound it makes me think of like some old like 70s really chill laid-back grooves where we smack it with the compressor but then that wah is almost non-existent it's just but as we bring the release back down and we're letting some of that happen you'll hear there's this extra tone that's there that's really important especially in rock music that we have some of that and this release allows us to determine how much of that we have so let's go from where we are now at a ridiculously long release let's pull it back to something really really short okay so this isn't really short yet this is back to around 50 milliseconds which i tend to like you get this kind of wha why it's almost a reverb type sound it's not actually reverb it's just the sound of that drum resonating past the initial strike of the stick on the head and this is why i love release so much is i can say how much of that do i want if i want more i'll just keep pulling the release back you hear that difference i get excited about this every time i do this because that literally sounds like i was turning up a bottom snare mic right we only only recorded this with a top snare i don't have the bottom snare mic but the way that release is interacting as i bring it down more and more and it gets quicker and quicker we hear more of that sound of the snare drum is coming through so instead of the initial we're hearing a little bit of that happening and it almost sounds like we're adding in more of the bottom snare just by adjusting the release knob i cannot get enough of this so i'm going to set this kind of where it started i've set my compressor to default to these settings because i tend to like it somewhere in the 40 to 50 milliseconds range for this particular snare on this day sounds pretty good to me let's dial that in actually no i went up a little bit higher up to 80 milliseconds i liked it a little bit darker a little less of that sort of sound liked it a lot we'll stick with that now let's move on to eq i'll keep this one really quick because there's just three things i want to show you there are three eq zones that i think about when i think about eq'ing snare drum zone number one is the beef zone this is anywhere between 80 and 250 hertz this is where the kind of chest thumping sound of the snare drum hits if you like a big beefy snare like i do then these are where those frequencies are if you're missing them you can boost them here if there's too much of them you can cut them zone number two the grossness zone this is around 400 hertz i've not found a snare drum or really just any drum in general where i really love the sound of 400 hertz there it gives it this boxy kind of hollow muffled sort of a sound so i generally like to at least try out doing a cut there nine times out of ten it makes the snare drum and any drum sound better zone number three the sizzle zone now this can change from snare to snare but it's probably somewhere in the one to five k range maybe a little bit higher if you go too high you start to boost the sound of cymbals but in the one to five k range that's where that sparkle that snap lives so if your snare sounds good and big and thick but then you turn on the rest of the mix and you're losing it just a little bit in the top end a little boost in the 1 to 5k range somewhere in there will give it that extra snap and sizzle that you're looking for all right let's demo that we'll take the snare that we've already compressed and we'll add an eq after that first let's do a boost down in the beef zone so you can hear what i'm talking about i mean if you want just like a super cool tight thuddy 70 sort of sound can go wrong there so we'll leave a little bit of that boost there all right now let's look at the grossness zone at 400 hertz you hear that it's just gross let's pull that down oh it's tight and beautiful all right now let's go find ourselves some sizzle up in the one to 5k range depending on the style of music having that extra kind of top end as soon as it gets a little bit brighter there i instantly think of more pop tunes for some reason it's got a little bit more of that kind of really grab your ear sound that works well and we ended up right just below 5k here so the sizzle might be a little bit higher 1k is like down here [Music] so you can hear going from 1k to 5k is a pretty big difference but somewhere in there you can get a little extra of that sizzle that you're looking for in the snare drum okay that's it if this was helpful for you i'd love for you to consider becoming a subscriber and if you want more help from me i've put together something called my five step mix guide that you can have absolutely free by going to fivestepmix.com thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 26,327

Keywords: mixing, gear, home recording, equipment, joe gilder, presonus, studio one, home studio, snare, mix, eq, compression, attack, release

Id: UPXIeBVAqDA

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021