From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Big thump snare - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Start my 1-month free trial

Big thump snare

- [Instructor] Occasionally you need the snare thump to be bigger and fatter than life. This trick will show you how to get that big thumping snare that you're looking for. First thing, lets play this song and listen to the drums listen to the snares especially. ("Never like This" by Nashville All Stars) okay, so yo can hear what it sounds like. The snare sounds pretty good, it's just not big enough. We can make this bigger by first making a copy of the top snare track. So let's make a copy. We'll just say we want the active play list. That's all. Okay. So now we have a top and bottom snare mike. Let's put these all in... Here's the real trick though. First thing we're going to do is add an EQ. Under EQ, we're just going to curve out a really small band. And the band is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 to maybe 300 cycles, somewhere in there. Might want to roll off some of the low end here. Something like that. We don't want the high end so roll off some of that too. We just want the thumping lower mid there. Now, lets listen to the snare. First of all we'll listen to the top and bottom snare and then I'll bring in the brand new one. (drumbeat music) Now, let's listen to the track. (drumbeat music) You can hear it rounds up the bottom. Now, you might say, "we'll wait a second we can do this with EQ". Yeah you can. This makes the sound a bit more natural because we're not just EQing the top snare track at all we're adding another one that we're EQing and we're putting it just kind of underneath we're adding to it. We're not manipulating the original track a whole lot and this makes the sound a bit more natural. Now, we're going to do something else here, we're going to add a little bit of compression as well. So we'll go to our standard compression and let's just listen to the new track. (drumbeat music) the real secret here is the release control. We want the most body that we can get so, we're going to add more release. You might want to call this a set of release call it a body control because it's the amount of body to the sound that we're adding. (drumbeat music) Now let's listen to the track (drumbeat music) Here a big difference there, huh. As a matter of fact it rounds up that bottom quite nicely and it goes through a little bit of parallel compression that's sounds really good too. To add a lot more thump to your snare sound first duplicate the top snare track then insert a compressor on the new track. Set the compressor for around 6dB compression with a short attack and a long release time. Now insert an EQ after the compressor on the duplicate channel and boost at about 100Hz to 300Hz. Filter out the highs above around 1kHz and the low frequencies below 50Hz or so or , whatever seems to work in the track. Finally, add the new track into the drum mix to give the snare more bottom and punch.

Contents