Mixing Fat and Punchy Snare Drum
Mixing fat and punchy snare drum is quite quick and easy job to do, once you have a decent sounding snare to start with. All you need is an EQ and a compressor and you’re good to go. This is how to mix fat and punchy snare drum:
Nothing earth shattering effects or magical tricks, just a simple approach of making the snare have more top end, low end and energy. Many have too complicated approach with mixing snare, it doesn’t have to be that way.
With snare you don’t need the sub frequencies so cut them out with a low cut filter. Usually a high shelf boost around 8kHz will make the snare much brighter. Boost until it sounds bright enough. Depending on a snare, boosting somewhere around 2,5 – 5kHz is a great for emphasizing attack and snap.
In case your snare sounds a bit boxy, boost around 500-700Hz to find the frequency and cut it out. Lastly, around 200Hz gives that nice fatness and low end.
After EQ use a compressor to give the snare some energy. Use slow attack time to let the initial transient get through before the compression happens and fast release. These settings work well on kick and toms also.
These are guidelines that I’ve found works most of the time really well. However don’t trust them blindly, use your ears and not your eyes when mixing. That’s one of the reasons why I like to use a parametric EQ instead of a graphical one.
Hopefully you found this video helpful. If there’s anything you want me to cover in the future videos let me know. Send me an email or leave a comment below. Ask if there’s anything unclear or if I left something out. Cheers!
