"in your face snare" how to get there...

Gomez

Gomez

Member
Nov 4, 2005
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London U.K.
www.orgonemastering.com
Ok, so I have been trying and reading around with no luck.

I got nothing to hide here, my name is Jaime Gomez Arellano (mostly known as Gomez), and I'm primarily a mastering engineer, and tend to master lots of metal but when it comes to producing I work in a very different field than you guys (I have worked with Guapo, Jarboe, Aethernor, Steven O'malley, Shora, Mothlite and many other "avan-prog" bands). I do Mastering for Candlelight and Peaceville amongst other metal and non metal labels. I have enjoyed some success and I make a living out of this so it's all cool...

... but now I'm producing a death metal project (in fact, my own) which is kinda prog death metal. My approach to making records (perhaps some of you have heard some of my work) is very different and I'm, well, experimenting a bit. I'm more from the Steve Albini, Andy Wallace side of things, lot's of ambience mics, little processing and so on.

The mixes I'm doing, are going ok... but there is one thing I cannot seem to get right and that is the snare drum. For this project I do want that really tight, fat snare sound, but had little luck so far... I want that kind of meshuggah catch 33 snare sound. So I went out and bought DFHS and Drumagog... hmmm....

I don't really program drums. So the DFHS software was pretty useless to me. Then I went out to look in the individual folders to grab the individual samples to use in drumagog and I couldn't work out what sample was what... so I picked a few I though they sound ok and put them in drumagog... thin as fuck. I messed around with them - not happy. Then I picked up Andy's snare files from this forum and smae kinda thing, they sound good, but not quite there...

... So, I was wondering if you guys could give me some advice on this.

And, yes, I tried compression, EQ, Waves trans mod and so on... I think the snare also has it's own space in the mix, but I just got that BIG snare sound in mind and don't seem to get around getting it.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Always learning!

Thanks!

Gomez
 
Haha, very constructive Mike - Gomez, welcome dude! Without any examples of what you have right now, the most I can say is try parallel compression, and also check out the Steve Slate sample packs, cuz I've heard great stuff from 'em. Of course, if you had clips, that'd help even more! ;)
 
definately get the slate samples, for that smack boost some highmids and compress them, reducing maybe 3-4db with medium attack/release.
there are a lot of go to snares in that package anyways, keep drumagog and use the Slate stuff with it.
 
If your snare is sounding good to start with, sometimes it just takes the right usage of a gate (or expander, or both) and using a clipper to really get the snare to poke out (if you need it, sometimes a compressor is fine). For the gate, try using a trigger track shifted a couple of ms forward to trigger it open, and adjust the release to cut the bleed out.
 
Just to be clear, a gate won't make the snare itself sound any better, but rather will let you boost it without worrying (as much) about noise, right?
 
I'm sure Ed will correct me, but I'll go ahead and say, with my logic on it, that using the gate serves exactly what you are thinking Marcus, as well as giving a tighter snare sound in general. Kinda like using a transient plug to kill off some of the sustain. At least that's what I typically do anyway...

~006
 
Thanks for the replies guys, all very informative, particularly :ill: cracked me up :)

Ok, So I'm mixing as we speak. And, I'm mixing straight into my analog mastering rig as I need to get this done ASAP and... seems like the :Puke:L2 was killing the snare... so it seems I'm getting somewhere... maybe I can post a mix later and see what you guys think (again, mixing metal is not my area of expertise).

And I don't get it, toontrack samples used to be they way forward a couple of years back... I thought they were pretty thin, so it's good I'm not the only one here that thinks the same... I hear a lot of the Slate drums, are they really that good?

Thanks a lot guys!
 
I think the snares in Superior 2 are pretty nice, but many of the others sound like they are tuned too high. I quite liked the DW snare in Superior 1, its pretty thick compared to most.

You guys pretty much got it with the gate - cutting more bleed out allows you to have it more prominent in the mix with less problems, and you can also control the sustain of it. If you want to fatten up the snares, try blending some reverbs together on it.

I commonly use an algo-reverb for a longer decay, and a plate for more immeadiate reverberations. Try EQing the reverb afterwards aswell, I sometimes boost the lower mids (if there is space in the mix for it). The reverb stuff depends on your mix - if you want a natural sound you may want to use more ambient kinds of reverbs than 'fake' ones. I'm also a big fan of room mics on drums, they can really fatten things up and add another dimension. If not using a room mic captured when you recorded the drums, try blend some room samples in (Slate samples are great for this). If not slate, you can always try the toontrack stuff and use the ambience tracks that they make.
 
Oh yeah man, L2 will kill your snare in a flash. The Slate samples are great, some of the best samples out there. ToonTrack's libraries have always had that thin sound. DFH1 was just...thin city. The cymbals are usable though. The DFHS library is ok, and remains on my drive and I do use it from time to time. EZDrummer is alright, and you can get the DFH1 expansion, using the cymbals in conjunction with another instance running another EZX. The Nashville EZX is the only one with normal snares that aren't thin. The kicks in every single ToonTrack library have been weird to me. They can be tweaked or replaced...but for the life of me I cannot understand why they sound like they do. The toms are always decent enough. I recently got Addictive Drums and I'm digging everything BUT the kicks, which have way too much thunder to them, so they also sound odd. The snares, toms and cymbals I'm really digging, although the cymbals *can* get a little fake sounding from time to time depending on what you are doing. ToonTrack was the innovation because they made DFH, which aimed for heavier musicians and was also one of, if not the most elaborate sample libraries that had ever come out at the time. Now there is a bigger market for drum libraries whereas back then it was mostly drum machines being used haha, so along with that is more groups of people getting together to make sample libraries to compete with ToonTrack's products. ToonTrack just had a nice head start is all :)

~006
 
yeah, 240hz

I tried it with waves Q10 and put the width (q) to 100 and the effect was pretty minimal, but removed the klang.

edit: 15dB is nothing, I usually cut about 50dB from mids in the kick =)

kicktest.gif
 
I'm sitting here with pretty much the same snareproblem as gomez.
Tried to cut -15dB at 240, 450 and 640 hz just as ahjteam suggested and i got rid of the "klang klang" but still the real in your face feeling is missing.
Adding some highs sounds logical, any specific suggestions on hz and db?
I'm pretty new in mixing so any suggestions are welcome!
 
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