Reamping Snare

[NewAndImprov]

Dont think about each channel as what the track is marked. think of all the channels as "DRUM KIT" and get what you can out of them. I have gotten pretty awesome snare sounds out of ONE mic in the room, when the close mics sounded like poop.

I learned this mixing my band's last CD. Our drummer uses 2 snares, his regular, big, deep sounding one, and one that is tuned really high and pingy. On one tune, he plays the long intro section on the pingy snare, and then switches to regular. When this was tracked, for some reason the mic on the pingy snare didn't make it into protools, the track was there, but it was empty. We didn't notice this until after we got the track home to my studio to mix. After trying to pull the snare out of the overheads, which didn't work, I noticed that it was fairly strong in the high tom mic, so I cloned that track, deleted everything but the snare hits, compressed the crap out of it and actually got a fairly cool, kind of electronic sounding snare that fit the tune pretty well.

[Al_Huero]

Played around with it last night and got some cool results. Still need to work on mixing it in with original tracks a bit more but overall it gives a much more snappy snare sound that was missing from the original. I ended up using an E609S just off the rim through on RNC in "supernice mode". I also tried it dry as well as running it through an Alesis Microlimiter--which sounded kind of crazy/cool but not right for the songs.

One thing I noticed is that having it gated and cranked back through the speaker, some of the softer snare hits came out significantly louder in the reamped track. In one song I was working with there's kind of low roll at the beginning that gradually gets louder. I had to put in reverse fade to get it to work.

Overall very cool though; it's fun to have some experience with new techniques.

[joel hamilton]

Oh, I forgot this too:

I like to stem out the sample, or the re-mic'd snare track through the same channel as the main snare susally, so they are being subjected to the same time constant from the same compressor. Really makes them sound like one big thing instead of two different attack times loading up to make a weird "lispy" front edge.

I have been amazed at how transparent this trick can be when used well in a mix.