oookkkk....
defeater snare sound time. i'll shoot for less long winded and ranty on this one.
Pearl 6.5 x 14 aluminum ref series drum. This thing is a monster. We went through literally over 10 snare combos before decided this was the winner AGAIN. (we used it on our lost ground EP as well).
Tune it low.
Do not dampen your top head with anything, if you have to do this. you're screwing the pooch and need to get your drum tuning game one.
A little ring is cool, it's what connects the hits and turns it into an instrument with it's own body / life / and soul and not a dumb lazy wooden (or metal) turd.
a minimum of 35% of my drum sound are the room mics. These are croosh. basically, i hate phase issues. they ruin everything. but if you are trying to make someone feel like they are hearing a drummer in a real "place" and not listening to a snare next to their face, then you need mics at varying distances from the kit to give it that 3rd dimension that takes us from playing Super Mario for original NES, to playing mario galaxy 2. like i said. croosh.
at this point, provided your drums sounds good when you hit them. your drummer doesn't suck (generally he does), and you have your head wrapped around phase... shit should sound good already in the control room with just some minimal panning. I don't eq, i don't compress, i don't do a damn thing while i'm tracking drums. Post processing is just that, POST. If what you hear sounds like shit, then stop. figure out why and don't say "it's cool i'm going to trigger that rack tom anyway."
why?
because you are screwing yourself out of being able to use those natural actually believable mics that are further away from the kit. So then you'll end up on GS reading a bunch of knuckle heads telling you to high pass your rooms and overheads at like 800k so you can get all of your "body" from the close mics / drum triggers (DUDE THEY SOUND SO REAL!). imho, that's ********.
ok, so things sounds good in the control room. hell yes. now, the rest is about maintaining what you have created AND the takes AND the composition. Just because Joey Homeboy spent 12 hours a day for the last 7 months writing these siiiiiiick drum parts, does not mean they don't suck. they probably do suck. they are probably all about how far he can get his wang into his sweet vented limited edition triple stripe sparkle orange county drum that his boy who works at guitar center got him a sweet deal on, when he should be doing his job.
Sometimes he just needs a tweak or two, sometimes you need to straight up re-invent, sometimes the drummer knows what's up and handles his business. But it's your job to drink a **** ton of coffee and make sure he's on point.
The drum composition drastically effects your ability to mix the drums. I know that sounds weird, but it does. When the puzzle pieces aren't fitting together right, no DAW trickery will every get you to the promise land.
I do think 421's are awesome on top snare. The whole which mic "bleeds" more thing is dumb to me. they all bleed and that' a good thing. remember that every mic hears everything that is going on, just to different degrees. we should be WORKING with that, because it's reality and not trying to fight physics. So yeah, maybe a 421 has more bleed, but i find that bleed to be less annoying that a 57 personally. Think of Bleed as a girls. Bleed IS coming to your drum party, period. Now, do we want fugly "i wouldn't hit that with a bag over my head" bleed or do we want "She's got curves but if I have a beer and dim the lights it's do-able" bleed? NEITHER are ideal, but lets at least have as few fuglies at the party as possible. And IF they have to be there, lets as least put them work work.
Make me a sandwich, bleed.
