Help Bringing out the snare?

[shwinerz]

Hey guys, I know I’m not the best at mixing in general, but I’ve found it really really hard to bring out the snare in the mix. The snare is almost peaking on the mixer, so I don’t want to increase it, but it just doesn’t feel punchy at all!

Heres a couple of examples

http://soundcloud.com/ashmusician/eclipse-2

http://soundcloud.com/ashmusician/wake-end-idea

Anything would be appreciated! It’s probably a silly mistake that I’m making but yeahh

Topic

[Geno Plitt]

First of all I like your material. Very nice guitar textures. Mixing drums is a big subject. Here’s what I would do –

EQ – Find the “thud” frequency in the snare – somewhere around 250 or so – it changes with the snare – Bring this frequency up a little with a narrow band until is sounds good. Do a high pass right underneath that frequency to kill any muddy low frequencies that may come from the snare. Find the “Crack” frequency – somewhere up around 3k. Boost this frequency to taste. (to find these frequencies you have to set up a narrow peak filter, boost it high and search around to find the thud and crack frequencies)

Compressor – Use about a ratio of 4, drop the threshold just below where the signal is peaking, if you need to adjust the makeup gain, bring up the signal so that it’s peak is maybe -3 or -6. Attack – 1ms, Release 200ms.

Here is an example of my approach. I’m not using any makeup gain on the snare.
http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=7127861

[Mike]

I’d consider experimenting with making the whole kit clearer in general, proximity is a huge part of modern mixes that allows everything to be heard and have it’s own location in the mix.

Add some lows to the kick, the beater is all that’s cutting through.
With the snare solo’d, just mess with the upper EQ freqs and see what you think. While having a mound around 250 is good, it’s super dark in the current mix and that’s not helping at all.
I wouldn’t put any attack at 1ms unless you’re going for that sound, it’s a tone killer IMO. I’d start around 25ms and release it around 50ms and use the rest of the suggestions in the post above.

PC, 2.4 Duo, Win XP, Cubase, S2.2.3, Metalheads

[Geno Plitt]

Sinister 7 – I hear you about the 25ms attack. But if you are already clipping (which he said in his post) it’s a different problem. A fast attack and a low threshold it IS a tone killer – if you squash the snare with a low threshold. My threshold is barely down at all, in fact I use very little compression. I’m using the compressor kind of like a limiter to stop clipping. So – I agree with you – if you set your threshold low with a fast attack it will kill the tone, and then you might want to set the attack higher to allow the transient to come through. It’s a personal choice on how much you squash the snare with compression. My personal choice is not to. Again check my example – the settings I describe produce the snare you hear. You can play with all these parameters to come up with your own tone.

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