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The pre-Napster CD era coincided with puberty, which seemed to hit every boy in my grade except me. I first encountered that sound when it emerged from the voids of American top 40 radio and basic cable between 19. The sound of the cranked snare is so conspicuous it has a tendency to distract even casual listeners from any other sounds with which it happens to co-exist.
#SNAPPY SNARE DRUM PROCESSING CRACK#
Elusive and obtrusive, the cranked snare can resemble a timbale, a doumbek, an 808 clap, but also popping popcorn, the crack of a whip, and a Louisville slugger making contact with a fastball. It is both a sucker punch and a mysterious fragrance that never seems to dissipate. Songs like “ Every Breath You Take,” “ Two Princes,” “ Unsung,” “ You Got Me,” “ Down,” “ What’s My Age Again,” and “ Like I Love You,” among others, were all propelled by the crisp spasms of the cranked snare drum.ĭry, tight, and piercing, with a bright metallic sheen that hovers long after it’s struck. Want to get more tips straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our newsletter here.The snap, crackle, and pop stuck out like a sore thumb as part of hits spread across three decades. Want more quick mix fixes? Get tips on fixing a boxy snare sound. To put some “snap” back into your thick snare, try boosting around 2,000 Hz with a narrow bell filter. “Body” can be boosted or cut around 100-200 Hz with a gradual bell filter, and “warmth” can be controlled around 200-400 Hz.
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Applying a gentle high-pass filter around 60-80 Hz with an EQ like the Q10 Equalizer will help reduce mud. You probably have a monstrosity of a snare that needs to be tamed. Overall Tonal Shaping with EQĮverything you’ve done up until this point has involved making your snare bigger and meaner. Gently turn up the output level on the CLA-76 until your snare feels sufficiently full.
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You can aim for around 10 dB of gain reduction using a ratio of 4:1 or higher the idea is to really crush the signal. Play around with different release settings to see what suits. Use a compressor with a super-fast attack like the CLA-76 Compressor / Limiter and apply peak compression using a fast attack. This mixing technique can result in snares that are full-bodied and bold. Use Parallel CompressionĪpplying parallel compression to your snare involves creating a duplicate track of your snare recording, heavily compressing it, and mixing it together with the original unprocessed signal. If you’re feeling particularly creative, you could even try Berzerk Distortion on your snare and see what it does. However, applying tape saturation with J37 Tape, in moderation, can result in a snare that “splats” nicely out of your speakers.įor a more aggressive effect, try driving your snare through one of the guitar amp emulations found in PRS SuperModels or GTR3. A saturator will, on top of distortion, apply compression to your audio signal, which is where the transient loss can come from.
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Saturation and distortion can beef up the harmonic structure of your snare, but be careful not to kill the desirable transient information. If your snare pokes in the wrong way, try instead to reduce the attack level in Smack Attack and then boosting the overall track level of your snare. If your snare needs more front-end “punch,” then boosting the attack should help. This should lengthen the feel of the snare in the track. To overcome this, try using a transient shaper, like Smack Attack, to boost the sustain level of your audio signal. Sculpt Attack and Release with a Transient ShaperĪ common cause of a thin sounding snare drum is that the tail end of the recording’s waveform decays too quickly. Snare drums don’t always need to be as “beefy” as kick drums, but they do need to sound impactful this can be achieved using transient shaping, saturation, parallel compression, and equalization. If your snare drum sounds like a pencil hitting a tambourine, you’ve got a “thin” snare drum on your hands. We offer 4 tips for remedying this issue.
#SNAPPY SNARE DRUM PROCESSING FULL#
Sometimes your snare doesn’t have enough of the full and impactful flavor you need for it to sit properly in the mix and carry weight.