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Mike Senior's Expert Tracking & Mixing Tips
Depending on how it's set up, compression can do radically different things to the sound of a snare drum. In this episode, Mike Senior explores three ways in which a compressor can help bring your snare tracks to life.
Chapters
Depending on how it's set up, compression can do radically different things to the sound of a snare drum. In this episode, Mike Senior explores three ways in which a compressor can help bring your snare tracks to life.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:38 - Inconsistent snare hits
05:24 - Sustaining snare hits
08:16 - Enhancing attack
12:30 - Summary
00:38 - Inconsistent snare hits
05:24 - Sustaining snare hits
08:16 - Enhancing attack
12:30 - Summary
If you'd like to listen more critically to the audio examples, you can download a high-resolution 24-bit/44.1kHz WAV of this whole episode from the podcast support page for this show https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/three-ways-compress-snare-mike-senior-podcast
Credits
This month's episode features recordings from The Purple Hat Mob's 'Access Denied' and Dunning Kruger's 'Japan Song'. If you'd like to try mixing these projects for yourself, you can download the full raw multitracks for them here:
These projects were also featured in Sound On Sound in the February 2020 'Mix Rescue' column, and in the October 2012 and February 2013 'Session Notes' columns, which can be found in the magazine's article archives here:
For more general advice about compressing all kinds of drums, check out this Sound On Sound cover feature from February 2017 called 'Drum Compression: Fashion The Sound You Want':
Mike Senior is a professional audio engineer, regular SOS contributor, and author of the best-selling books Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio & Recording Secrets For The Small Studio. He runs the Cambridge-MT educational resources site (including the web's largest free multitrack download library) and hosts two monthly independent podcasts, Project Studio Tea Break and the Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast.
Creators & Guests
Host
Mike Senior
Mike Senior is a professional audio engineer, regular SOS contributor, and author of the best-selling books Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio & Recording Secrets For The Small Studio. He runs the Cambridge-MT educational resources site (including the web's largest free multitrack download library) and hosts two monthly independent podcasts, Project Studio Tea Break and the Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast.
What is Recording & Mixing?
Welcome to the Sound On Sound Recording and Mixing podcast channel where you’ll find shows packed with Hints & Tips about getting the most out of the recording, mixing and mastering process.
More information and content can be found at www.soundonsound.com/podcasts | Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - @soundonsoundmag | YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/soundonsoundvideo
Welcome to the Sound On Sound Recording & Mixing podcast channel.
I'm Mike Senior. In this episode I'd like to look at how compression can serve a variety of very different roles on your snare drum track. This is something that confuses a lot of Project Studio users, because snare compression that helps one mix can easily harm the next. So I'd like to share with you three of the most common compression settings I typically use.
More importantly though, I want to demonstrate what the purpose of each one is at mixdown, because that's the key to avoiding the confusion.
Inconsistent snare hits
The first setting is the one, honestly, I use most often. Because it tackles the most common problem. Which is the drummer not hitting their drum consistently enough.
The snare is so important to most mainstream productions that you usually want to make sure that it holds its place pretty firmly in the balance. Real world drummers though, don't always hit the drum consistently every time. Take this bit of snare close mic recording for instance, where the snare level varies quite a bit hit to hit.
So the aim of my first type of compression is fundamentally just to try and even out the performance levels a bit. Now as with any type of compression in practical terms, that means reducing the compression threshold, so that the compression kicks in on any hits that are too loud, and then using the ratio control to determine how firmly the compression turns down those processed hits.
If the compressor's gain reduction pulls down the overall level of the snare part in the mix, then you can use the compressor's make up gain control to bring it back up to an appropriate level. What's really important when processing snare, though, is to get the attack and release times right. And for basic balancing work, that means setting the attack pretty much as fast as possible, because the compressor needs to react quickly enough to catch the whole of each drum hit, including its initial onset transient.
Now there are some compressors where you can set the attack to be so quick that it actually distorts sounds or changes the attack character of the drum. So keep your ears peeled for those kinds of side effects. But with a lot of compressors you can just whack the attack control down to minimum and it's fine.
The release time on the other hand usually wants to be fairly slow. Slow enough, at least, that it avoids pulling up the tail of the drum in between each hit. Bear in mind, though, if it's too slow, the compressor won't have a chance to reset its gain reduction usefully between hits, which will undermine its fundamental level rebalancing function.
So let's now have a listen to that type of compression in action. First I'll play you the uncompressed snare part again and then I'll follow that with the compressed version.
Because this type of compression is all about level management and not about changing the character of the drum sound, it's fairly transparent. But there are some problems you may occasionally encounter while trying to use it. For example, if there's a lot of spill from other instruments on your snare track, this type of compression may have the side effect of increasing the apparent level of that spill.
Here's a different snare close mic recording, for example, that has quite a lot of hi-hat bleed on it.
If I try to use my first type of compression to even out the level of the snare hits, the hi-hat gets even more overbearing. Here's the unprocessed snare track again, followed by the compressed one.
You can also hear a second problem in that last example, which is that the drum hits aren't just variable in terms of level, they're also variable in terms of tone. So no matter how hard I push the compression, the performance still sounds a bit inconsistent. Let's have one more listen to that compressed version.
In both those cases, my preferred solution would be to edit the drum multitrack so that the snare becomes more consistent without compression. Let me demonstrate what I mean quickly. First I'll play the same raw snippet of snare close mic recording we've heard already and then I'll play an edited version where I've patched up any snare hits that are too low in level or have undesirable tonal variations.
As you can hear, the edited version doesn't really need much in the way of processing because it's already more consistent. Basically, we've fixed the sound at source, and fixing the source is almost always a better tactic than processing.
Sustaining snare hits
The second type of snare compression that I use quite regularly actually has very similar control settings to the first.
Again, the threshold and ratio controls determine which hits are affected and how firmly they're processed, while the attack control makes sure that the compression grabs even the very start of each hit. The big difference is that you speed up the release time, because the purpose of this kind of compression is to push down the transient and leave the rest of the snare drum the same level.
Let's have a listen to this kind of compression in action. Here's a snare track that's been generated by a virtual instrument. First without any processing, and then with my compression setting to reduce the transient level.
Now you might very well ask, why would I want to reduce the punch of my snare like this? And the answer to that question comes from looking at the situation from a different perspective. Compressor's make up gain control to restore the drum's transient to its original level. The end result isn't a reduction of drum transient, but an increase in drum sustain.
Again, let me demonstrate what I mean here. First I'll play you that same unprocessed snare track and then I'll follow it with the compressed version, but where I've used the make up gain to reinstate a similar transient level.
It's because this type of compression can act as a sustain enhancement that I find it so useful and use it so regularly. You see, in a dense mix texture, the lower level sustained portion of a snare sound will tend to be masked by other instruments and I regularly hear Project Studio mixes where an otherwise respectable snare drum recording has been reduced to a kind of a bup sound, simply because all of the snare's character frequencies are being obscured by heavy electric guitars or layers of keyboards and vocal harmonies.
Using a compressor to emphasiae the sustain tail of the sound can help make the drum feel more rich and powerful without apparently increasing its subjective level in the balance. What you do need to pay attention to when using this kind of processing though is the exact release time setting, because adjustments to that parameter can make quite a big difference to the character of the snare sound.
For example, let's have another listen to the compression setting you just heard and then I'll play it again, but using a much faster release time.
Enhancing attack
Now the third type of snare compression that I want to talk about is probably the most confusing, so bear with me here. You see, we naturally think of compression as something that turns down signal peaks, but with drum signals it can actually end up emphasising the peaks. To explain how this works, let's go back to my first compression setting, the one that's designed simply to control balance.
If I reduce the threshold level, that compression setting is going to react to pretty much every hit. But if I then increase the attack time setting, the compressor's going to end up responding too sluggishly to catch the initial transients. So even though the main body of each snare hit gets turned down by the compressor, the transient levels remain roughly where they were.
To demonstrate what this sounds like, let's now compare that first compression setting, the one that was just designed to deal with balance, with a setting where I've reduced the threshold and lengthened the attack.
Now clearly in the second example, the compression has turned down the subjective level of the snare drum as a whole and when you turn up the compressor's make up gain to compensate for this, you end up making the drum transient levels higher than they were to start with. Let's have a listen to that.
I'll repeat the two examples I gave a moment ago, but this time I'll use the make up gain in the second example to match its subjective snare level with the first example.
So even though a compressor is something that is designed to turn things down, if you can target it just on one element of the snare sound, you can then use the compressor's make up gain to turn every other element of the snare sound up. Now it's as well to point out at this stage that this approach to transient enhancement does have some potential downsides.
The main problem I have with it is because compression is a threshold driven process, the amount of transient enhancement applied to each hit is quite closely linked to the hits level. So if the drummer's performance is inconsistent, the amount of attack enhancement on each hit will be inconsistent too and if I play my last example again, you'll hear that inconsistency quite clearly.
Some hits just sound like they have more attack than others, which isn't usually ideal from a mix perspective. This is why I rarely use that third compression setting these days, because there are now tools that do the transient enhancement job much more consistently and effectively. I'm talking about plugins like SPL Transient Designer, Waves Trans-X, or Melder's MTransient.
These don't use a threshold level to detect transients, they detect them by checking how fast the level envelope changes. So they're much better at detecting transients irrespective of how loud they are. For example, here's that same section of snare drum recording processed with Melder's MTransient and notice how much more reliably it emphasises the attack of each individual hit.
You'll also notice that because there's no make up gain involved in that processing, the levels of hi-hat and cymbal spill on the snare track haven't been emphasised either. Dedicated transient processing is just a better targeted approach. It's also important to realise that if you're trying to use a compressor to enhance attack, it won't be as effective at controlling balance.
With this in mind, have another listen to the comparison between my first compression setting, which is about dealing with balance and my third compression setting, which is to do with enhancing attack.
The first example keeps the snare at quite a consistent subjective level, while the second has some hits feeling louder than others.
Summary
Drawing all this together then, what I hope I've shown is that compression isn't some kind of one size fits all process. The same compressor on the same snare drum sound can produce quite dramatically different results just from a couple of parameter changes and I think this is at the heart of why so many people find compression confusing and ultimately can't get the results they want out of it at mixdown.
So for instance, if you just choose a compression preset and happen to choose one that says snare punch, now that might be based around the same kind of compression setup I used in my third example. In other words, it's designed to emphasise attack. But if you were hoping that the compression might even out performance inconsistencies, then an attack enhancement setting isn't going to do the job for you and unfortunately, what actually happens in practice is that a lot of people, when they don't get the results they're expecting from a particular compression preset, they just push it harder, which doesn't really solve the essential problem and just produces lots of horrible sounding processing side effects.
Or let's say you pick a preset that says Fat Snare and that's been designed to increase the sustain of a snare drum sound. You might then be disappointed that it's effectively making your snare sound less punchy. Similar kinds of problems can also arise if you choose the wrong modelled analogue compressor.
I mean, it seems like everyone now has dozens of analogue-style options available to them and it seems that people often choose a certain compressor because they've heard that it's good on drums, in some kind of magical way, rather than taking into account what its technical characteristics are. I mean, an LA-2A is a lovely sounding compressor, but it's just too slow and gentle to control performance variations in a snare drum part, so I would never in a million years use it for balancing my snare in the mix.
So the bottom line here is that if you want to make sure you're getting the best results from compression on your drum parts, try to focus on the specific goal you're trying to achieve, whether that's rebalancing performance inconsistencies or adjusting the attack or sustain of each hit. Once you've got that goal clearly in mind, then it's easier to adapt your plug in choices and settings accordingly.
That's all for now. Thanks for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information including web links and details of all other episodes. You can also download a 24bit WAV version of the show from there, if you'd like to hear the audio examples at higher resolution.
And just before you go, let me point you towards www.soundonsound.com/podcasts, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. I'm Mike Senior and this is a Cambridge MT production for Sound On Sound magazine.