I hate the snare drum.

  • Thread starter Thread starter camn
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camn

camn

Active member
The more I hear it, the more I hate it!!

How does one get rid of the snare rattling to all get out all the time??

Sure I can gate it..

but what about on stage.. when any sound the bass makes triggers the snare? How on earth can I get around that.?!

ANd the Kick!! Any time our dummer hits the kick.. the snare goes! What do youall do?? Just gate it? how about the overheads??

Soon I will go crazy. Im gona do that speaker-on-a-snare redub thing, i think.

xoxo
 
But the snare always says such wonderful things about you!

Seriously, the answer really does lie in mic selection and placement. What'cha using on snare and kick and how are you pointing it? Most cardioids should give you enough rejection to find an angle that works.

Whatever you do, don't start taping the snare. You'll end with the head covered, and then you'd might as well just have the drummer play a roll of duct tape instead. You might consider putting a leather wallet on the snare if the player can deal. Question his manhood. That always works for me.
-kent
 
Go out and buy an O-Ring for the snare. Pretty cheap and acts like the wallet does. It is meant for the snare though, so it will stay on it. Also may have to do with how you're tuning the snare.
 
I didnt track any of this current project's drums. Big problem.

xoxo
 
This might be a better question for the folks over at prorec.com

I have no experience in this area but like you said common sense would suggest a gate and perhaps some kind of EQ cut. Also as someone semi-suggested you could make the snare a little lower in the mix but tell the drummer to always hot the snare really hard so that it is mainly definate hits that come through.

What you really need is a live engineer or pro to give you advice. Blue Bear might know.
 
hmm.. Does anyone have a killer Sample (or better yet.. a multisample) of a tight-assed, crackin snare? maybe a piccolo?
I may just have to replace them all.

xoox
 
i might be able to send you a sample when i get home from work. i have a piccolo snare. it sounds sooooo good.
 
being a drummer I would say it needs to be tuned better.

lower the tension of the snare "on/off" lever all the way and untie the snare itself and get it as tight as you can and then re-raise the tesnion through the nob on the lever. make sure the bottom head is tight enough and that the top is tight enough to allow a slight indentation when you press your finger on it (if you use a kevlar head then go shoot yourself for being an idiot because they just sound awful on anything other than a marching snare)

also tighten all of the lugs on the bottom head to the same tuning and then lower the 4 next to the snare about a half or quarter of a turn.

that should drastically lower the buzz. the O ring won't do anything for it because that stops ringing which is something you don't want to stop on a deciently tuned snare because it will sound dead . . . also move the basscab away from the drums. . . and maybe your're playing the drums too hard. . . drums are an acoustic insturment and cannot compete in volume with a guitar or bass half stack or stack

peace
sam
zekthedeadcow@hotmail.com
http://www.Track100.com
 
Ok, here's my tip of the day ;) (it's only for saving your recorded songs)

Copy the snare track to another one. Copy it in a way that gets the tracks start like approx 3ms earlier than the original one. Use that second track as a sidechain for gating/expanding (and if you want to, compressing, too). Listen to the sidechain track and play with loads of EQ. Probably you'll have a low and a mid-frequency that will push your snare. Try to push these frequencies a lot in the sidechain track. Then listen to the gated track and set the threshold properly. This way you can REALLY clean up your track. Especially if you recorded more than one song in this session, you'll be much faster than by editing manually (which BTW is the 'cleanest way to do it, but horribly slow). Record the gated/expanded track to another track.

It may happen that you do not find any threshold / attack / release / hold setting that gives you satisfactory sound. Then you might have to do it in two steps: first identify the low freqs that enhance your drum, and gate (you will get rid of the snare rattling), then in a second step gate with the higer freqs as sidechain (that will kill your bass-drum bleeding)...

If you use an expander instead of a gate, it may be totally sufficient. If you get the snare rattling and bd damped by lets say 40 dB, they'll probably not hurt too much in the mix...


Ciao

Axel
 
thanks axel... thats good stuff. That is my current solution... mad gating PlUS expansion plus compression plus reverb.
However the snare still sounds like crap... but at least it only sounds like crap when I want it to.

BUT I am going to try and resample the thing.

xoxo
 
Hi camn!

What I found extremely important was the sidechain arriving earlier than the track to be gated, otherwise the transients would have missed... I had the similar problem, the snare was bleeding so much in my bass drum, that it would have significantly effected the EQ and caused phasing problems. My first gating try using a simple ew in the sidechain was not successful, as all the transients of the kick were gone. The BS was completely dead. Not EQ would have changed this...

Another thing I have found may improve your snare sound (is REALLY kind of freaky): record white/pink (I dunno) noise on a track and gate it with a rather slow release and the sidechain on the snare. I found that by accident when 'mastering' old cassette tapes that I had. I used a multiband expander and suddenly there was so much ambience, especially on the snare...

Ciao

Axel
 
I am borrowing a DW snare drum for recording it is so tight and so beautiful.
 
good times axel!

you know tho.. my biggest problem isnt 'bleeding' per se.. but when my man kicks his kick.. the snare on the snare actually rattles.. causing a snare-like sound to hit, even if hes not snare-ing! So its really hard to EQ out without losing the snare sound itself.

Im curious about this 3ms predelay deal.. what does that do? Ill try it next time im on the machine.. but Id like to hear more about delays and stuff....cuz my tracks sound pretty Gated right now.. though pretty clean.

No Dm-pro. Im gonna ty to redub the things... but I have to keep the drums as acoustic as I can, to contrast with OTHER electronic elements.

Kingson.. does its snare rattle when you kick the kick??

xoxo
 
i got a ton of nice snares...then again a ton of not so nice.

if you want em, email me and i can mail em zipped to you.
 
High Camn!

I might have caused a little misunderstanding: the trick is not to use a delay of 3ms, but a 'negative delay' of -3ms. You'll only get that on digital workstations (by cutting out a piece of the trigger track before the 'real' song starts). The triggering input then will be earlier than the signal, thus allowing you to use relly low frequencies on the trigger. If you do that without the negative delay, you'll probably loose all transients. You might get a kind of 'click' at the beginning of each beat, that some people might like, but I prefer to have 'real sounds' (as long as you can call them this way after all that processing). I used that kind of gating on two kinds of tracks:

a) on sandwich played tracks, where the machines of the bd has a horrible squeaking and the snare was well to be heared on the bd track and on the snare track, where the bd would 'trigger' the snare's rattling, too. Usually, the rattling is rather high frequent, so if you use the lower frequencies of the snare to trigger the gate, it should work.
b) on a 'live' record in our rehearsal room, where the bass triggered the snare. It also worked nice.
But: it is a lot of tweaking, but IMO much faster that editing by hand (which I HATE!).

The problem is that this won't work for live, unless you delay everything EXCEPT the trigger track by 3 ms. Then again, you might have serious phasing problems with you monitors :(

Ciao

Axel
 
Awesome snare sample

Here's a song from my last bands drummer's other band. I think the snare is actually tooooo loud, but that's great for this purpose. Reply with what you think of it. Thanks. Greg.

It is a song from MP3.com by a band called The Preshure Point. The song is called August And A Last Goodbye. I think the snare sounds wicked.




Oh yeah.....this will only work if you Right Click the link and "save target as...". Enjoy.
 
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