From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Hard snare - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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Hard snare

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- [Instructor] Sometimes it's better to keep the dynamics in the snare track rather than smoothing them out too much. This trick will show you how to keep the snare controlled, but add effects only on the big hits. So first of all, let's listen to our track. And this is with all the instruments in, but no vocals. ("Never Like This Before" by Nashville All Stars) Let's add some reverb to the snare, and this is a very short reverb. It's a plate timed to about .6 seconds or so. Now listen. ("Never Like This Before" by Nashville All Stars) Now you can hear what's happening, the reverb is reacting not only to the snare hit, but to the leakage as well. Leakage of the kick drum, the leakage of the hi hat, and it just muddies things up a little bit. So what we want to do is make this cleaner and in doing so, we'll get some other effects as well. So the first thing we'll do is take this top mic snare track and duplicate it. And now that we have it duplicated, the first thing we're going to do is add a little bit of compression to it. The compression really isn't the important part here, but we'll add a little bit anyway and let's solo it up. (rhythmic snare drums) Not gonna change too much here, just start with that. And here's the real trick, we're going to add a gate. So we'll take our standard expander gate here. Now what we're going to do is try to cut this off. So we're only going to hear the snare drum. In doing so, remember that this is all within the attack, release, hold, and threshold control, and it's how we set these up that's important. Now, have a listen. (snare drum drums rhythmically) Our range control is how much the gate is actually going to turn off. In this case, we don't want it to turn completely off, just mostly off. (snare drum drums rhythmically) Now what's happening here is we can get this track to turn almost off after the snare hits, but not exactly because the leakage is still triggering everything. So what we're going to do is actually use the side-chain in order to trigger just certain frequencies. Here's what we're going to do. First thing, we're gonna click on this here, and this allows us to just listen to the side-chain. Now we have high and low frequency filters we're gonna listen to. (snare drum drums rhythmically) I'm gonna zero in is just on the frequencies that affect the snare drum, that's all. If I can isolate those frequencies then I can make the gate just react off of the snare drum. (snare drum drums rhythmically) That looks like it might work, let's try it. (snare drum drums rhythmically) Sounds pretty good. Now again, we don't need it to turn completely off. We don't need this to be completely smooth, just mostly. And what's going to happen is we're going to add a little bit of reverb to this particular track. So let's go and get our short verb and let's add some. (snare drum drums rhythmically with reverb) That sounds interesting. Let's listen in the track. As a matter of fact, let's only listen to the drums. (loud snare drums drum rhythmically) That explodes kinda nicely. Listen again and then I'll mute that track and then you can here the difference. (loud snare drums drum rhythmically) Adds a nice crack and it also adds that reverb. If you only want reverb on the loudest snare hits, first duplicate the snare track. Now insert a gate in the new channel and adjust the threshold to open on the hardest hits. Use an aux to send some of this channel to a reverb. Remember, that you can also adjust the gate to open on every snare hit instead of only the loudest ones.

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