Monday, August 15, 2011

Which one of these doesn't belong

It has become more apparent to me how important all aspects of your drum mix are when it comes to cohesion. You can have the best kick drum sound in the world, followed by killer, punchy toms, trailed by sweet, crisp overheads, but if your snare sounds flat and lifeless, the whole drum mix suffers. As we are all aware, in metal, the two most critical drum elements are the kick and snare; if one falls short, the other will follow.

I was having just this problem. I had a great kick drum I was consistently happy with, however, I couldn't get the snare to fit the music. Not even having 5 inserts, EQ, 2 reverbs, and parallel bus compression could make this snare sounds like it belongs; and that is KEY word - belong. When I soloed the snare it sounded fantastic, alittle cut on the EQ here, a limiting amp for snap, and a touch of reverb to round it out, but as soon as the solo was taken off, it was like the song fell apart. I tried every combination of plugins, reverbs and EQ, but to no avail. Again, it wasn't that the snare sounded bad in its own right, it just didnt fit the overall mix and vision for the band.

So I did what any good engineer or musician would do; got up and walked away. I came back a few hours later and decided to start over. So I went back to the sample we made of the drummers snare (used so there is no cymbal bleed), and thats when I realized you can't make something sound like something it is not. The band wanted a deep snare with body, and the sample I had was of a ringing snare with mostly top end. So I could only take that sample so far. I re-opened the track and popped in another snare sample for fun, and the song came back to life.

So thank you drumagog for saving me and my mix. I was finding it hard to mix anything else when the drums didn't sound together. It was like a roadblock. So after a frustrating evening, we are back on track!

On a side note, I will keep that snare sample in my back pocket for future use!

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