Bringin' Out the Snare

  • Thread starter Thread starter BDiNkY30
  • Start date Start date
BDiNkY30 said:
I have a beautiful fat cracky snare in my mix and i cannot for the life of me get it to stand out.
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I don't mean to poke fun (yes I do :p ), but it is rare to see a sentence contradict itself. :D

It is compressed as a snare should be
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The required minimum compression setting for a "beautiful fat cracky" snare is "none".

Does anyone have any advice to really bring the snare out of the mix???
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*Ease up on the compression. Especially that fast attack time.

*Get yourself some mix headroom. Turn all of your faders down. Turn your amp up.

*Turn the snare up.

*Listen to the whole mix and find out what is getting in the snare's way. Try fixing that.
 
I've struggled with the exact same problem in the past, and it was always when I had a compressor on the snare. So now, I pretty much exclusively go with no compression on the snare.

Like Rami said, just turn all of the faders down until the snare is as loud as you want it in relation to the rest of the music. Yes, your overall mix volume will be lower, but that's why stereos have volume knobs.

You could also try strapping a compressor/limiter across the master bus to get a bit more volume out of the mix, but keep it subtle or you'll do more harm than good.
 
It's astounding to me that "turn everything else down" has not crossed this guys mind on it's own.
 
BDiNkY30 said:
It clips when i turn it up.. I have the compression thresh at about 6db reduction with a 2ms attack and 290 release... why is the snare not cutting the mix im getting very frustrated
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compress with an attack of 25-30ms, so that the initial transient passes thru

then get a plug-in called G-CLIP...it's free, and is awesome

use said plug to clip the transient in a manner that isn't audible. this will give you both the punch and volume which you seek.
 
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