How do I conquer the dreaded snare ring?

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xfinsterx said:
well you are married to the ring now im assuming.
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My wife and I exchanged rings after snaring each other at the altar of matrimony. I want to keep mine.

Here's a useful article demonstrating how to deal with a ringy snare.
 
xstatic said:
How many times do we have to listen to the same reply form different people because they don't even know what the question is?
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If we got all the questions answered in a systematic and comprehensive way we wouldn't have anything to do.

I try to tune my guitars before every track. It's much harder to tune the recording.
 
relax gentlemen. all help and advice is appreciated. yep, its too late for this project, I'm married to the ring. But advice for tuning and getting the sound right will be duly noted for the next time I'm recording... Drum tuning has always sort of been a mystery to me. I can tune a guitar, but I can't tune a drum to save my life.

I have some good suggestions, and as soon as we finish overdubbing vox, I have a bunch of things I can try based on stuff mentioned in this thread, so thats cool.

finsterx- its not a metal band, but it is some fairly heavy stuff. Sort of Bleach-era Nirvana-ish... I've toyed with the trigger idea, but I haven't figured out how to do it with my software just yet (n-Track). Maybe this is a good time to learn.

HOWEVER, I'm still looking for a suggestion on a good gate plug-in, so if anybody cares to chime in there...

thanks again.
 
My post was an obvious joke...

But who says you can't tune and retrack?

I like the trigger idea personally, then again the last time I used real drums in a track it was a school project. :D
 
I'm sure you already know how to eq, but I've found it very effective in tame a bad snare ring by setting the bandwidth as narrow as possible, cranking the gain, then sweeping the frequency until the ring is the loudest it can be, then reducing the gain until the ring is practically gone.

The ring sound is part of the "body" of the snare hit, so compression will probably make it worse. If you have a transient accentuating plugin (examples are Waves TransX or Voxengo Transmodder), this may help as it accentuates the attack, which will be more stick sound than drum sound.

I would also experiment with eq'ing out the ring before and/or after compression if you've got a computer-based rig. Hope this helps a bit...

This has turned into a good thread. A lot of people have trouble with snare ring when recording and mixing real drums.
 
+1 to a couple of the thoughts here.

parametric eq or a multiband compressor would be your best options if you want to keep the original track and cut down on the ring.

you could always retune the snare, retrack a couple hits of it and fly those into the production--replace the overly ringy hits with the not-so-ringy ones.

and Drumagog or Sample Replacer or something similar would be a good tool here if you wanted to sample/trigger it.....ie: "replacing it" instead of "dealing with it".

and i'd say that a large portion of "modern drums" are sample replaced anyway.....so there's no "feeling like a wuss" when doing that.


still....IMO, since it's "heavyish" music, i'd learn to love the ring.....


cheers,
wade
 
Lance135 said:
I'm sure you already know how to eq, but I've found it very effective in tame a bad snare ring by setting the bandwidth as narrow as possible, cranking the gain, then sweeping the frequency until the ring is the loudest it can be, then reducing the gain until the ring is practically gone.

The ring sound is part of the "body" of the snare hit, so compression will probably make it worse. If you have a transient accentuating plugin (examples are Waves TransX or Voxengo Transmodder), this may help as it accentuates the attack, which will be more stick sound than drum sound.

I would also experiment with eq'ing out the ring before and/or after compression if you've got a computer-based rig. Hope this helps a bit...

This has turned into a good thread. A lot of people have trouble with snare ring when recording and mixing real drums.
Click to expand...

Great advice.

I dug up some old recording with nasty ring, and I found a narrow notch at the ringing frequency cleaned it up quite a bit. For the track down about 6 to 9 dB with a Q of about 8 did the trick. I also ran it through a bit of a short reverb then compression to fatten up the snare track.
 
mrface2112 said:
you could always retune the snare, retrack a couple hits of it and fly those into the production--replace the overly ringy hits with the not-so-ringy ones.

and Drumagog or Sample Replacer or something similar would be a good tool here if you wanted to sample/trigger it.....ie: "replacing it" instead of "dealing with it".

and i'd say that a large portion of "modern drums" are sample replaced anyway.....so there's no "feeling like a wuss" when doing that.
Click to expand...

wow thats another really good suggestion that I had not thought of... I was thinking of just using a good sample, I never thought of using a sample of the same drum. I could get a much cleaner and better recoding of it, 24/44.1 straight to PC instead of the Tascam 688 that we tracked drums to...


mrface2112 said:
still....IMO, since it's "heavyish" music, i'd learn to love the ring.....
Click to expand...

yeah, I gotta say that it really doesn't sound all that bad in the mix with the band going full blast, but there are a few tunes that start on drums by themselves and its pretty horrendous.
 
low tech approach, worked for me

I haven't read all the answers you've recieved but I was a semi and pro drummer for a while and my way of keeping snare rattle down was pretty low tech. Check to see there are no broken, or importantly, loose snare strands on the bottom of the drum. Try using a dampening ring underneath the top head and if all else fails try adding small strips of gaffer tape ever 3-4 inches across the snare itself. Hope this helps :))
 
Ring is good, to a certain extent of course...

You may actually want to hear the whole mix first. You might be surprised at what becomes a lot less noticable once everything is playing. You might deaden the snare track so much that it becomes lifeless in the mix.
 
In addition to the old wallet trick, I've used bandanas and heard of tampons being used. A cool idea for a ringing snare is to take an old discarded batter head and cut out the center until you have a narrow ring left. Set that on the snare as a gentle damper.
 
Hey

Try setting up the EQ when the signal chain has the compressor before the EQ. Tune it out by turining the gain down all the way and sweep the frequency. Then adjust the gain until you get a reasonable sound. You may need to play with the Q control too. You'll probably have to apply cut in the 6 - 10 KHz range.

Now move the EQ to before compressor. Make sure the compressor release is pretty short, unless you have the reverb pre-compressor (often precompressor reverb can accentuate the ring after compression).

You might (or might not) find this article on EQ Frequencies .

Cheers

John
 
i know this isn't gonna help the original poster - but for the future - where the snare is hit is kinda crucial on the most well-tuned snare. off to the side, and a lot of snares turn into the bells of st. mary.

also - and i'm not sure what the technique is called in drummerland - but having the drummer keep his stick on the drum head after the hit - instead of having it bounce off - is just an amazing sound.

hope that helps a little for the future. :D

Mike
 
If your trying to isolate the ring on a snare rum thats allready tracked, you could copy the snare track and sometimes its esier to isolate the ringing frequency than it is to eliminate it.. Then take that and revers the phase and insert it back in, kind of a lot of work, but it will eliminate the ringing frequencies as they wll cancel each other out.
 
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