Anybody use this snare technique?

[JASIII]

A friend of mine was in the studio with his band and he said that to thicken up the snare drum sound, they pointed a speaker directly over a mic'd snare drum and used the original snare track to trigger a blast of white noise through the speaker at the mic'd snare. They then used both tracks of snare drum when mixing down. Anybody try this? Is it only useful for certain styles of music?

[Shawn Simmons]

I've done this a bunch. It's kind of an old trick. It works well but only if the original snare track doesn't have a lot of bleed on it (from the kick drum). You may have to gate the send to the speaker if there is a lot of bleed. This is a very good way to give your snare a little more life in the mix. Try it out.

shawn

[HoneyBear]

This is called re-amping. Its a technique thats been around for a long time. If you get heavy into mixing and someone brings you a mix where the snare sounds like crap (but is hopefully in the pocket) - this may just be the saving grace. Its like sound replacer before sound replacer. Re-amping can also be a good way to add some room tone to a generic synth sound. Send the synth out to a clean amp in a lively room (sometimes I use my bathroom) and mic the amp from a distance. Make sure the re-amped and original signal are in phase before recording and then mix the room tone in to taste.

[cgarges]

This is ALL OVER Jack Joseph Puig's records. You don't have to use the snare to trigger a blast of white noise, you can just use the actual snare track sent to a speaker sitting on top of the drum on a snare stand. Gating the send to the speaker, like Shawn mentioned, will give you lots of seperation of the snare buzz, but having a bit of the kick drum and or toms setting off some of the snares will sound more natural. Of course, you could always do something crazy like mic the bottom of the snare drum in tracking (jump back--getting a little whacky here) but this trick will give you a bit of that same thing without taking up the extra track space.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[toothpastefordinner]

I use the "radio free europe" snare trick a lot which is to do an overdub of just snare drum. It is often useful to turn up the high frequencies on the overdubbed snare track to get more snap in the snare without a huge mess of cymbals and hats too.

Useful to me anyway! (NB: I don't have any mics worth more than $300, I have a mediocre room to record in, and I can't play drums very well.)

drew
www.toothpastefordinner.com

[digdug]

What do you guys use for a noise source?

[leigh]

What do you guys use for a noise source?

In Pro Tools there's the "signal generator" plug-in.

Otherwise you can use a hardware noise source (like a synth) or a radio tuned between stations.

Leigh

[joel hamilton]

I think two techniques have gotten their wires crossed here....

Traditionally people would trigger a white noise burst with the gates linked to the snare, so you got a quick little "pffft" playing with the snare to give the illusion of perfect presence of the snare side, OR you would put an auratone on top of the snare, and gate the original snare being sent to the snare/speaker setup, and mic that, print it to another track, and then chill out on the snare gate, or loosen up all the way.

You wind up with stereo snare sound that has no hi-hat in it. This works especially well for a snare track full of hats. You can key the gate to frequency below the hats, then send that blast (that sounds like a gate) to the speaker, and have a nice time coherent snare hit to bring in along side the crappy hat/snare mess.

An auratone placed right on a simmons pad is the other 80's trick for snare, like on the cars records. or a gated blast to an amp with a couple of snares in front of it (like a twin) works amazingly well, because the two snares dont ring alike, so you get this insane white noise sounding blast back, but you can mic it in the room instead of up close. You get a sympony of snares happening all at the same time, and depending on the gated original snare you are sending, can be amazingly delicate, and really sound like it is "playing" the snare.

I love this trick. I have used it a million times to fix screwy tracks.

soundreplacer is for kick drums. This actually works!