You're in for a ride...
Over time, I've painfully found out things that affect my work ethic today, and I'll share that so maybe you get a perspective on the matter. Especially in this case where you have a run of "polishing turds" back to back.
-First you have to rewind and go back to the root. What snare where these kats using? I mean was it a pic snare? thick snare? Metal? Brass? Stainless Steal? Wood? Maple? What mic did you use?
How many mics?
You have to ask yourself these questions cause this is going to affect the sound dramatically.
It was for this reason that I got tired of certain tastes bands tend to have when they are inexperienced. Keep in mind that what I'm about to say is a bit of a catch 22, cause an engineers holy creed is to preserve the sound of his subject as the subject wants it.
But sometimes you have to think for your subjects. So I established this work ethic:
-I bought and customized my own snares that I bring to every session no matter what. After about a month of thinking what music I would work in, I finally settled on a 5 by 13 inch maple snare, 5 by 13 inch brass snare and your standard 5 by 14 stainless steel. Remo weather kings: Emperor on top, ambassdor on the bottom.
This settled nicely in between. I always have different sizes to work with. Of course the real talent is to convince Jimi the drum distroyer to use your snare over the typically problematic snare these guys bring in.
The reason you have these sizes is because sometimes you might have to go over the top to get this huge snare. It might be the 13 inch that does it, or it might be the 14 inch. You never know until you feel how the guy plays, what room youre in, how your drums are tuned, etc.
I've never gotten a complaint yet, so if you bring that up, I don't suppose anyone will fight you to the death over it.
-I bought my own custom heavy duty guitar amp. Likewise with the amps and FX, sometimes these guys need a boost in the right direction. However, no details here cause the focus is on drums.
-It's probably advisable to make a worthwhile investment into serious compression. You don't need 30 of them, just 1 good multi purpose will take you far.
In some situations, you may need to track with heavy compression on the snare to achieve that larger than life sound.
But alright enough of that, that's just some of the basic stuff to give you an idea. It basically lets you know that it's ok to be anal and develope your own work routine.
Tracking and Mixing wise:
I'm going to try to lay the chips out as best I can, cause this one is just a personal one you can't just figure out in a self help cook book. You gotta visualize the sound.
So first you consider micing. You usually find yourself with an MD421 or SM57 on the bottom snare. The top mic is usually where artistic expression comes in. I used to do SM57s on the top as well, but I eventually stopped because the SM57 only goes so far as your top snare mic.
There's generally alot of EQing that goes into the mixing, plus I could have avoided this with a beautifully capable condenser "full body" mic on top.
As stupid or as pointless as this sounds, the combination of both bottom and top are actually going to instantly give you perspective on a complete snare sound. Of course remember about polarity.
Sometimes a 3rd mic is introduced into the equation. If you have open channels to do this with, you can set up a 3rd mic facing the shell itself (on the side of the snare at 90 degrees). As to what mic to use on this, I leave that up to an imaginative mind.
The mixing aspect:
So how the hell do you mix all this? Well that depends on what you want. If it was jazz or funk, then probably what you already have is not too far off. If done in a good room, then the dry/hollow sound of the snare (combined with the room) may suffice.
But if you want big snares, then you gotta think big. Huge reverbs with short decay times (fast music), massive punchy EQ and serious compression.
For this, it would take me all day to tell you word for word to achieve a sound that only you can hear in your head. So rather than get specific, just a few basic pointers:
-Your top head is your leading track. Here you get most of your body, your punch and your initial attack. It can usually be left dry with the support of your bottom head. You can compress this track, EQ it, whatever.
-Your bottom head is your supporting track. Your "FX support" if you will. You can send this off to a reverb of your liking for added dimension in combination with the top head. You can try gating this head and set your release times to the tempo of the song to tighten things up.
So if you solo this out, you hear a snare going directly to your reverb. You solo out this and your top snare, then you suddenly have the makings of a good snare sound.
-Other things to consider is sound replacement and layering. A trick I learned to "modernize" snare drums was to use a combination of both.
You simply create as many copies as you feel nessessary of your main snare track. Then you can either find FX that you like for those copies and print them to the track. So you'll always have your main unaltered snare, but now suddenly you can mix and match all these snare FX tracks. Plus they'll always be on time cause they are simply a copy of your snare track. That is if you don't decide to print a delayed effect!
If you want to get even more silly about it, you can edit exactly when you want certain snare effects to come in (like a chorus or bridge). So you can have this crazy digital snare in the verse and suddenly you switch up to a super duper whatever effect on the chorus. Keep in mind that the orignal snare track is still leading all of these to fortify the effect (if you choose it that way).
The other way involves sound replacer and a good library of snare FX samples. You can simply take your copied tracks and build custom layers by sound replacing the original source with a digitally sampled version. Alot like the other one, but cleaner and million times more flexible.
Cool huh? Now maybe you've armed yourself with knowledge that just might be able to make your bands look better than they may be.
(I think I'm going to repost this, maybe others want in on this.)
