Volume and Compression of the Snare

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Hey Andy and everybody,

here is my new question of the day : how do you work with the snare track when the energy is greatly varying from part to part ? Do you set a compressor for the whole song (in my case, it's quite hard since it's an hour long song...), or do you automate the manual volume changes ? I'm using a quite long Attack time (50ms) to have more punch on the snare, but when there are some really hard snares (rim shots for example) coming, it doesn't prevent them. Shall I double compress it ? One compressor for the punch, and one for the volume ? Or am I doing everything wrong ?

Thank you for your answers

Brett

 

[egan.]

An hour long!?...jesus I thought my band wrote long songs. Anyway, I compress it the whole time...but these days I end up using a triggered track too w/ about 50% of the original dynamics. Then I run the triggered track underneath until I feel I've got the added consistancy I want. As far as your compression settings, I feel that 50 ms is too long of an attack to actually do anything about the transients. If you feel that anything faster than that is elliminating 'punch' then you have probably set your threshhold too low. If you don't want to use a trigger you could also run a bus and limit the shit out of the snare on another channel, but you should watch out for latency issues.

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

I'd have to agree with double tracking, one for the trigger and one for accoustic sound. That said the key to a good snare sound is where you stick the mic, hehehe.