No matter what I do I can't get my snare to come through the mix strong.

[kylendm]

So I have a problem with my snare, in all of my mixes. No matter what I do I can't get it to come through the mix.

Basically what I have going on is this.
I have Superior Drummer 2 just for cymbals, toms and room mics. I have all that sending to two drum buses. A Raw drum bus and a compressed drum bus and I mix those two together and they get send to the master.

Next I have SSD for my kick and snare with other samples too. The kick is sent to the drum compressor bus and it's own bus with compression and that is sent to master.

The snare is sent to drum raw, comp and it's own reverb bus which is sent to raw and comp drum bus.

Everything work and sounds fine in my opinion but the snare. I have a pretty solid hard hitting snare but it looses all of it's attack. No clipping or anything like that going on. Just lo/hi passing, EQ and compression.

[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/kylendm/archdec9/s-obgXo[/SOUNDCLOUD]

That's the mix I have. I added some meat to the kick since but it's just that snare that is really getting lost and sounding weak.

The snare is a mix of Snare 15, 11A and 12A. Maybe I'm just using shitty snares? They sound decent to me, if anyone can help me out that'd be great because I'm just at a loss with this now.

Here's a sample of the mixed snare too.
[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/kylendm/snare/s-SP2Nb[/SOUNDCLOUD]

 

[Studdy]

Try boosting on snare between (180hz - 230hz) while listening to the snare in the entire mix. I've been surprised sometimes that a hefty 6db boost in that area can bring the meat of the snare out and not really get muddy sounding. Do not eq the snare in solo because it will sound like the boost is too much. Although i though the snare sample you posted sounded great but a touch thin. I'm also listening on laptop speakers right now, so my judgement could be s touch off. Also have you tried side chain compression of any kind? Usually the snare fights with guitars a lot. Try finding frequency areas that sound "bad" on guitars(or whatevers conflicting) and see if the "bad" spot has good/useful snare tone. These are places to cut/sidechain or whatever. Hope this helps. Try using only using 1 sample and also add a sample that just accents and fills out what you have without necessarily "hearing" the sample. Just some ideas.

 

[kylendm]

Going to try that now. Thanks man, really appreciate it! And I have tried side compression a bit with both snare and kick but it didn't really work out for me in this instance.

 

[iceman666]

Trying EQ ing and finding the correct frequency to boost. I once tried a maximizer and it worked for me. Just saying.

 

[kylendm]

[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/kylendm/snare-11/s-g2VEC[/SOUNDCLOUD]

How's this one? I think it cuts pretty nice now. I boosted around 200hz and 10k

 

[Studdy]

Don't forget side chain multi band compression. Find specific frequency that really makes the snare cut, then side chain the guitars or whatever to very gently dip in that area. Example would be to have Waves C4 on the guitars, have the guitars dip 3db or whatever a touch in the low mids where the snare resides. You don't want it to affect to guitar tone you just want it to lose a touch of its balls every time the snare hits. This is also a suggestion and by no means a go to solution.

Don't forget reverb can be your worst enemy when trying to get to the front of the mix. A good solution is to have a decent amount of pre-delay on snare so the reverb doesn't start until the snare hit is somewhat complete. I also see you have slate samples. I would most likely use a room sample to obtain my sense of snare space as opposed to a reverb.

Good Luck \m/ \m/

 

[Studdy]

The 200hz boost was the ticket dude, it cuts much better

 

[kylendm]

Yeah thanks a lot man it really helped. It's crazy how just a little notch up in the EQ can make something come to life in a mix. Also I'll have to look into side-chaining a little more because it looks like that's what could really help this problem in the future as well.

 

[Studdy]

I was always playing safe and shying away when boosting "mud/low mid" frequencies. But on the snare it really helps. Also i forgot to mention a clipper but I rarely use one. I pretty much only boosting on drums and vocals and find myself cutting to make room on everything else. Of course tomorrow this might change. lol

Glad I could help,
happy holidays dude

 

[mairomaster]

Grgrgrgr, the same terrible problem I had before some time. Your situation is not that bad actually. Back then, I spent about 4 days in heavily searching on the web and experimenting with my mix. Lots of useful thing have already been said, but I'll try to summarize/add some more:

-play with different samples/combinations of samples until you find the right one.
-be very careful with compressors - short attack times kill the attack of your snare
-be extremely careful with limiters (either on the snare, drum or master bus) - not directly obvious, but important
-work wisely with clippers - not that dangerous as limiters, but you've got the same problem when overuse them
-boosts around 200 Hz for power and 2-4k for presence
-watch for instruments masking important snare frequencies
-any kind of transient processing plug-in can be useful
-be careful with reverbs - easily make you snare sinks, use reasonable amounts and pre-delay
-consistent, hard hits are crucial
-be careful for phase problems with the overheads or any other mics
-well tuned snare is necessity