Either the drummer hit the snare exceptionally loud, or wallace boosted it for that one hit. listening to the drums though this song, it seems like wallace played with the levels all over the place...its awesome.
Wallace has a tendancy to ride a lot of stuff during mixing from what I gather. On Nevermind, he said he would often push the cymbals up a bit for choruses to add to the energy and back down for verses, for example.
As for consistancy, I've always believed that came in the mastering. When I working on a CD last year, I mixed each song individually. Mastering was where the consistancy came in for me. Often flitting backward and forwards between tunes. A/Bing them against each other. As mentioned, the track order comes into it aswell. It was something I thought quite hard about, often following heavy balls to the wall tunes with more mellow melodic stuff. Not exactly alternating perfectly, but also not keeping too much stuff that was too similar in timbre bunched together. Sort of like, a couple of heavy tunes, followed by a mellow one, then a heavier one, then a couple of mellow tunes..etc etc.
Wait! You're doubling 80 tracks?????????????????????????? (Even if you meant 40!!!!!!!!).
Why in god's name would you do that?
And why would you need 80 (or even 40) tracks for what you described as straight ahead rock/pop???????
I usually end up racking up quite a lot of tracks. Because my drums are done with battery, it wasn't a major hassle for me to have an individual track for each drum piece....2 kicks, 4 toms, a snare, 2 rides, 2 crashes, a splash. Add 4-6 rhythm guitars(distorted), 2-4 clean guitars, couple of acoustic guitars, 4 harmony guitars, couple of leads, 2 bass, 2-3 vocal tracks, effects and samples. And then there's the orchestral sections I use on occasion....
And then sometimes I'd have way less than that.
