Parallel Compression on Snare works well

[RawDepth]

I recorded this band live last weekend.

I couldn't get the snare up front in the mix without clipping the meters. Simply compressing or limiting the snare track sucks the life out of the drum and leaves it sounding dull. That vital mid-range attack seems to live within those transient peaks.

Parallel compression really got it under control and brought it forward in the mix without peaking. But I had to learn how to do it correctly. Standard settings and factory presets won't work at all.

Let me know what you think.

 

[Greg_L]

I couldn't get the snare up front in the mix without clipping the meters. .

Did you try bringing the other stuff down?

Sounds okay, but where's the kick?

 

[NightFlight]

It seems to have worked well. What do you mean by "I had to learn how to do it correctly. Standard settings and factory presets won't work at all" ? Could you explain the process a little?

Great song, perfomance, and mix, by the way; and I agree with Greg, there should be some more kick.

 

[RawDepth]

Did you try bringing the other stuff down?

Sounds okay, but where's the kick?

Yes, I tried turning stuff down, but then the final mastering compression still reduces the snare transient peaks and deflates its sound. This method seemed to get better results.

After listening on other systems, I agreed that the kick needs to come up. So I did bump it up a few dB. Thank you.

 

[RawDepth]

It seems to have worked well. What do you mean by "I had to learn how to do it correctly. Standard settings and factory presets won't work at all" ? Could you explain the process a little?

Great song, perfomance, and mix, by the way; and I agree with Greg, there should be some more kick.

I simply made a duplicate copy of the snare track and pasted it to a new channel. For that new channel, I edited the waveform using Waves L2 Ultramaximizer. It is a brickwall peak limiter that chops off the transient peaks and pulls up the underlying head and shell overtones by using makeup gain. In a way, it sort of follows the classic gated-reverb theory by stretching out the body of the waveform to make it more noticeable and distinctive.

If you study the second (compressed or limited) waveform picture, you'll notice that the transient peak is gone and the underlying information has been pulled upward for several milliseconds.

I blended the two channels using the faders until it sounded good. After A/B'ing the results, (by muting the second channel on and off) I could tell it definitely added a "fatness" to the drum which brought it forward in the mix without adding much gain at all.

I finally routed both channels to a bus and added very light and short gated-reverb for flavor.

 

[NightFlight]

Thanks for the tips, That's really interesting. I'm going to try it the next time I do some mixing.