Snare attack!

[IMF OnSite Recording]

I was spending over an hour fine tuning a snare sample for a new song I am producing and came face to face with an obstacle that I never experienced before. I had ALL my filtering and compression completed and it sounded great.. until I applied the effects. I reload it with the effects on... sounds great. Apply them to save... attack in the snare is gone. At this point I am very annoyed. Then, a light bulb went off in my brain. I had a mild amount of distortion on the snare... which adds harmonics. I stretched my clip in the front a bit so that about 5 ms in front of the snare sample was just silence. I zoomed in and applied the effect and noticed that the distortion added harmonics a few MS before the sample hit which triggered the limiter I had at the end of the chain.. since the clip went from the instance of the source sound to the end of decay, these EARLY harmonics were cut off as soon as I applied the effects. Dragging a small piece of silence before the sound gave it the room to breath harmonic-wise. This was big for me so I had to share it.

I got great snare attack out of 4:1 ratio, 3 knee, 4db of reduction and fiddled around 5-10ms attack. Adjust the release to the decay of the snare. Depending on the part of the song it may be hitting fast.. then the release would have to be lessened so the comp can recover for the next hit. This is where automation becomes your friend.

[Stan_Halen]

Cool, thanks for sharing that Ian! I have been trying the "add distortion" technique and this helps me think of that from a different perspective.

BTW - what happened to the nightly rant/rage Posts? I miss those ...

[IMF OnSite Recording]

Cool, thanks for sharing that Ian! I have been trying the "add distortion" technique and this helps me think of that from a different perspective.

Realizing that distortion will affect the front end of a transient was a breakthrough for me, although probably not for some. Using distortion\saturation is crucial for getting that overall bigger sound that competes with what you hear on the radio.

BTW - what happened to the nightly rant/rage Posts? I miss those ...

It is not the words spoken but the silence in between that remains precious.

[Stan_Halen]

Wow, that's deep. Lao Tzu? Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare? Oh sorry, shhhhhhhhhhh ...

[garageband]

I was spending over an hour fine tuning a snare sample

I spent an hour, the other night, tuning a snare drum.

[bobbybovine]

I spent an hour, the other night, tuning a snare drum.

Yuck!! Drums definitely require a special person.

[Beat Poet]

I spent an hour, the other night, tuning a snare drum.

Yeah I saw the OP's post, thought "this is good", then I saw it was about a sample.

[garageband]

Yeah I saw the OP's post, thought "this is good", then I saw it was about a sample.

I know you have spent an hour chasing a snare's tuning around before.

[brandondrury]

Thanks for the tip. I'm still not entirely sure I follow what you did, but I'll save in my list of possibilities folder if I run into trouble.

Realizing that distortion will affect the front end of a transient was a breakthrough for me, although probably not for some. Using distortion\saturation is crucial for getting that overall bigger sound that competes with what you hear on the radio.

Harmonic content is the name of the game for pretty much every instrument at least to some degree. Full-blown crushing of tones (particularly those with lots of transients is essential to any mix that'll end up loud). Keeping it a secret is the bigger challenge. It's all about getting drums to sound louder with less peak energy so they can survive the further limiting down the road.

Brandon

[IMF OnSite Recording]

Thanks for the tip. I'm still not entirely sure I follow what you did, but I'll save in my list of possibilities folder if I run into trouble.

No problem; there's a chance that this may happen, but not for most people. I have a feeling this can be diagnosed as "Ian's Snare Syndrome".
When mixing, usually all silence is removed so each snare hit is like its own little clip. The clip begins at the instance of each snare hit and ends after it hits -whatever dB. After applying the distortion, the attack of the snare was weakened, but sounded great before applying. I undid the rendering, zoomed into the track, and expanded the clip ever so slightly to the left to give it some silence before the snare hit in the clip and then applied it and noticed it added some audio information a couple ms before the clip... I then applied it and it was fine then. I was baffled... but the sample came out fine. Although I don't want to have to apply effects but I have to because my computer is too slow. I would much rather keep everything on and just print it at the end.