HOW TO MIX A SNARE DRUM WITH RC SNARE

The snare drum is arguably the 2nd most important element in a mix behind the lead vocal. It’s the backbeat of the groove, the defining rhythmic signature of the song, which makes mixing it exceptionally important. The challenge is that snare drums are inherently difficult instruments to control. A circular drum made of metal or wood, with two parallel heads stretched at varying degrees of tension and metal wires resonating on the bottom head—it’s a scenario ripe for strange overtones and resonances.

Over the decades, genius audio engineers and producers have developed techniques and tools for controlling these unwanted snare drum sounds. The downside is that they are generally quite technical processes and often require expensive equipment. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through some traditional methods for snare drum mixing and offer some faster and cheaper solutions with RC SNARE.

Step 1) Clean-Up

Ideally, a drum would be perfectly tracked, and a raw snare sound from the tracking studio would be perfectly ready to be easily shaped in the mix. Unfortunately, that is not always the case, and clean-up is needed in the mix. One of the biggest variables is the snare drum’s resonant overtones, aka “Ring”—that often annoying “Boing” sound. In tracking, this can be controlled with specific drum heads, tape, moon gels, towels, wallets, etc. But when left without those options in the mix, what can you do?

Traditional Solution: Engineers have used notch filters, parametric EQs, or graphic EQs. Modern plugin tools like Logic’s standard graphic EQ or the popular FabFilter Pro-Q are great. Using a graphical EQ’s FFT, you can see the frequencies (generally between 200 Hz–1 kHz) that are ringing out and build filters to try to remove them. There are also modern plugins like Soothe or Waves Curves Equator that analyze the source and work to automatically remove these unwanted frequencies.

These solutions are great but have a few limitations: A) Knowledge — you need to have a background and experience in working with these tools to understand what to do and what to listen and look for. B) Complexity — these are general tools that can do many different things; they’re not optimized for working on drums specifically. C) Cost — these tools are awesome but can be expensive when added together with other mixing tools/software. D) CPU Usage and Latency— modern smart analysis plugins add a lot of latency (Soothe is 2,048 samples) and soak up lots of valuable CPU power.

RC MIX Solution: RING — RC RING is available as a standalone plugin for FREE, but it’s also a central piece of the RC SNARE channel strip plugin. RING achieves the overtone clean-up solutions outlined in the traditional approach with a number of benefits. A) Simplicity — turn on AUTO on RING, and the plugin automatically reads your snare sound and adapts its filters to isolate the specific resonances of that specific drum. All you need to do is turn the knob up or down to control how much of them you want to hear in the mix. B) Tonal Preservation — RING only kicks in after the initial attack of the drum, so you don’t ruin the character of the drum sound while removing unwanted resonances. C) CPU and Latency — RC SNARE and RC RING use very little CPU power and only have 6 samples of latency, which is almost imperceptible in most settings and at higher sample rates.

Step 2) Sound Shaping

Now that we’ve gotten rid of all the “bad” stuff, it’s time to sculpt the good elements of the drum to accentuate what we want in the mix. Breaking the drum into five EQ segments is an easy way to think about the drum: Ultra Low, Low/Fundamentals, Low Mids, High Mids, and Highs, ranging from 20 Hz up to 20 kHz.

Traditional Solution: Snare drums generally don’t have any usable Ultra Low/Sub frequencies, so generally folks run a high-pass filter below 50–100 Hz, depending on how deep the drum is. Depending on the genre and the drum, you may decide to cut or boost the Fundamentals. Low Mids are largely handled in the clean-up process, but sometimes there are good frequencies in that range. High Mids are extra important, as this is the most sensitive area of human hearing and also where your guitars, vocals, and other mix elements will be fighting each other. Highs offer that shimmer and the snare rattle that’s so important in a drum sound.

You can achieve a lot of this with some of the EQ plugins discussed above, but adding a bit of analog color to the additive process is sometimes nice. Folks use API, Neve, or SSL analog processors that generally sound super musical for this. We have similar limitations in this process as well: A) Knowledge/Experience, B) Complexity, and C) Cost. A vintage analog Neve 1073 EQ sounds absolutely amazing but can cost upwards of $15,000 per channel.

RC MIX Solution: BODY, CRACK, and AIR. BODY, CRACK, and AIR are individual channel strip elements in RC SNARE that give you control over all of the frequency ranges outlined in the traditional methods above, but in a simpler and more streamlined approach. AUTO tech automatically listens to the drum to find its fundamental frequency, aka BODY, and high mids, aka CRACK, while AIR operates as a fixed high-frequency shelf EQ. Using these simple knobs that understand the drum sound automatically, you can simply turn up or down the areas of the drum that you like or dislike until it sits just right in your mix.

Step 3) Dynamic Control & Color

Drum performances can vary in volume intentionally or unintentionally. As the 2nd most important element in the mix, the dynamic range of the snare is incredibly important to the overall balance of the mix. Controlling that dynamic range helps the drums fit better in the mix and makes room for other elements, but there’s also an ability to use dynamic control to impart a level of color via tasteful distortion as those dynamics are being controlled.

Traditional Solution: There are dozens of snare drum compression and mixing techniques using a variety of compressor types, ratios, threshold settings, etc. Every drum and every song will ask for something somewhat different. Traditionally, mixing engineers will use tools like a classic UREI 1176 to control snare dynamics or maybe an Empirical Labs Distressor (which can emulate the 1176), generally with a slow attack, fast release, a 4:1 ratio, and 4–6 dB of compression. But there are many schools of thought and layers of additional compression used on modern records.

Another popular technique is to use snare drum samples to enhance the sound and add dynamic consistency to the performance. Unfortunately, samples can take some of the human element out of the drum performance and make everything sound “fake” or “robotic” if not done perfectly.

RC MIX Solution: RC SNARE handles this area with a super-simple one-knob compressor that we call PUNCH. Compression can be incredibly complex to understand, even for seasoned engineers, and each compressor behaves differently, so we oversimplified the processor with a single knob controlling threshold, ratio, gain reduction, and even analog harmonic distortion that many call “color.” Simply turn up PUNCH for a more compressed, controlled, and saturated drum sound, or dial it down for more dynamics and expression. PUNCH is always a parallel compression circuit, meaning a bit of the initial signal is mixed in with the compression in order to preserve the organic sound of the drum.

This has been a long-winded explanation of the tools we use in RC SNARE and how they compare to standard techniques used for decades across the biggest studios in the world. We hope this has helped you learn a few tricks and that you’ll give RC SNARE and RC RING a try on your own drum recordings.

RC Snare - Plugin