Snare sounds (follow up to Under Your Spell feedback)

[James GormanParticipant]

During the recent feedback video with Reid Shippen, he asked for the snare sample I used. Since it was a bit more involved than just slapping something into Trigger, here's a short how to on the sound.

The snare is made up of the live snare, Reid's metronome sample and three composite snares.
* The live snare has a tiny notch to clean up some muck
* The metronome has a gentle top end roll off, and some volume automation to get one of the rolls to sit right since it was at a constant level.
* Sample 1 uses two of Warren's PLAP samples with transients reduced and sustain increased. It's triggered from a gated copy of the live snare, with the dynamic range reduced.
* Sample 2 uses 6 Trigger snares with sustain increased, triggered from the metronome track.
* Sample 3 uses three of Billy Decker's Drumforge snares with a gentle EQ to fit in the missing tones. It was added to fill in missing tones and help the snare cut after all the rest of the song was mixed. Also triggered from a gated copy of the live snare, with the nearly the full dynamic range.

Beyond transient design, very little work was done on the samples, it was mostly a question of balancing desired tones and timbres. The use of both dynamic and static samples was to balance evenness and liveness.

The snare buss has:
* bx_console Focusrite for about 8-12dB gain reduction, a little EQ, and the odd bit of clipping
* Spiff, doing more top end than bottom to get it to really cut.
* TR5 Classic Clipper for another 3-5dB. This is for a little bit tone, but mostly getting rid of inaudible peaks to increase headroom going into the drum and master busses.

OH and rooms are just a bit top end, so adding sound but it's all that went to tape

Drum buss has bx_townhouse adding a bit more crack to things too.

At this point I've taken away bunch of transients from the samples, then put them back in on the buss, and removing some of them again. The reason is two-fold. Part of this is just the organic mixing process and trying to go forward, not back. The other part is getting exactly the right transient shape to dance with the music while not clipping (where I don't want it, anyway).

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ps, if you've got trigger the Billy Decker drums, hit me up for the samples

[Author]

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