Regarding the snare, I'll admit it was a very sample heavy sound this time. Given the main reference the band gave me, I decided to really bring the Slates out to play and emphasize them in the mix. Much of the character of the tone is simply from the sample blend. The rest was through me attempting to emphasize the 200Hz region a bit more than I normally would. So it's a bit more of a 'warmer' thud than I'd normally get. There are also 4 stages of analogue compression on it, if you count the serial compressor, the snare parallel compressor, the drum bus parallel compressor and the master bus compressor. All of these add up to really warm up and thicken the snare in a particular way. Slate's VCC was also used quite heavily in order to enlarge and soften the tone a bit more.
The magic weapon on the synths has to be the Overstayer compressor I used. I've found that compressor to only really work on drum bus, synths and backing vox. That's it. But when it works, it works well. It helped pin the synths and keep them from jumping around too much. The rest was really just incremental LA-3 compression per-track and some really brutal EQ to really thin out the synths and fit them around the main elements of the mix. They often want to completely dominate the low-end and vocal space, so you have to get quite brutal sometimes. Lots of filtering, and lots of aggressive cuts. The cuts generally depended on the sound of the track, but most of the synths got cuts at about 600hz and 250hz to remove unnecessary mid content. VCC was again used quite heavily to saturate them and keep them pinned in place. I used a Nebula high shelf EQ in order to brighten them globally in a pleasant way.
