From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Add some sizzle to your snare - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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Add some sizzle to your snare

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- [Instructor] There are times you really want the reverb on the snare drum to stick out of the mix like on a big slow ballad. Here's a way to get that sizzly sound while keeping it well under control. So first of all, let's listen to just the drum track by itself, completely unaffected. There's no reverb. There's nothing on it, but just have a listen to what it sounds like and zero in on the snare drum sound. (light drum music) That sounds pretty good, but what we want it to be is just a little more sizzly, and the way we get that is by, first of all making a duplicate of the under snare track. So the microphone under the snare. We want to duplicate that first of all. So I'm going to come down here and say, duplicate. And in this case, we'll just say duplicate everything. Here it is. (light drum music) It's exactly the same as the one that we just copied. So now what we're going to do is add an EQ. This is kind of the whole secret here. We're going to filter out the low frequencies first of all. We're going to do it up to about 600 cycles, just so you can hear it. (light drum music) And now what we're going to do is the boost the high end. We're going to go to about 10K or so. And with the shelf, kind of EQ, we're going to boost it. Now listen to it. (light drum music) Really emphasizing that high sizzly end. Now listen to the snare drum now. (light drum music) So we're adding just a little bit of extra sizzle to it. Listen to the whole drum track. (light drum music) Okay, but that's not all. Now what we want to do is send just the track that we copied, and we added the EQ to. We're going to send just that to the reverb. The reverb is on bus 11 and 12. Now have a listen to what it sounds like. (light drum music) Hear how sizzly that reverb is all of a sudden? Let's just solo up the copied snare, the duplicate snare. (light drum music) That's kind of cool. So to add some sizzle to that snare drum reverb, first duplicate the bottom snare mic track. On the new track, insert a high-pass filter and set it to around 600 hertz. Now use and EQ to boost 8k to 10k using a shelving filter. You can also experiment with a peaking filter to see which one works best for this song as well as raising or lowering the frequency. Finally, use a channel AUX to send to the drum reverb and add it to the track as needed.

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