How to Fix a Bad Snare Drum Sound

Tips to fix a bad snare drum sound in a music mix.

Related Article: EQing a Snare Drum

Sometimes you get stuck with a bad snare sound and are forced to mix with it. It might be recorded poorly, or the quality of the drum itself was so terrible that there was little to do while recording it than hope the mixer is a magician. Regardless of cause, here’s some ideas to make a bad snare sound workable in a mix.

Fix too much ring in a snare:

It’s very important to note that ring in a snare isn’t always a bad thing. Too much ring is, but no ring means a dead and terrible-sounding snare drum. So take a couple seconds to determine how bad the ring in the snare drum really is before you start EQ’ing it out. Its ring is about 50% of its the tone, so if you take too much away, you’ll still have a bad snare sound, but just in a different way.

You can get rid of most snare ring with aggressive notch EQs, a gate with a fast release, or a gate with a low range value (not a lot of attenuation after it closes).

Removing snare ring with an EQ:

First try some notch EQs that pull down the dominant frequencies in the ring: sweep between 500Hz and 800Hz as a starting point. You tend to get a lot of the dominant snare ring in the 600Hz-700Hz range. It changes with different drums, though, so hunt a little.

BE CAREFUL not to hollow out the snare or make it sound dead by EQing too much out. Ring is OK. If you’re not sure, then never take it all out. Leave some in, and then move on with the rest of the mix. You never really know if it’s going to work until its in context with the rest of the mix, anyway. Also important: get rid of the ring in the snare BEFORE you add any compression. If you compress the snare first, then it will make it harder to get rid of the ring, so a common processing path would be: gate -> EQ -> compressor, or even EQ -> gate ->compressor if you have some really big frequency issues.

Gating out snare drum ring option with gates:

Try two gates on the snare (yeah, sounds strange, but sometimes it works). One gate’s purpose is to “turn down” the ring after the initial attack, and the second one acts more as your actual, traditionally applied gate on a snare. Gate on (turn down gate) has no hold whatsoever, and closes very fast. It’s only purpose is to let the stick of the attack through, then starts to close so that the ring gets cut off. BUT instead of cutting it off by having a range of > 100, you only set the range of the gate to 10-20 so that it does not full attenuate the signal (e.g. doesn’t full close the gate). The ring is still there with a low range, but it’s a lot quieter and will likely get masked in the mix. The second gate can closes further (IF IT’S NEEDED, might not be at all),but set its hold so that it allows enough time for the first gate to turn it down before it (the second gate) actually closes with the larger range setting. Like I said, strange, but can work surprisingly well if you’re good with gate settings.

Next Page: Get More Snares, Parallel Compression

Get more snares sound from the drum.

If the snare drum sounds like the snares weren’t even engaged (and that’s not what you want), then try some pink noise, maybe some white noise, that’s gated and triggered by the snare track. It’s an old-school trick, but if done correctly (i.e. not too extreme like some Nine Inch Nails tracks) then it can work. If you don’t know how to trigger gates using side chain inputs that’s covered here: How to trigger gate with snare (click to jump… needed another list and I don’t know how to make a list inside a list on a web page) ;)

Get a bigger drum sound with overheads and room mics.

If you’re lucky, then you have some good room mics on tape, which will help make your snare sound a lot better. Good room mics in the recording will give you a much deeper and wider overall sound to the drums. Smart compression is also important there. The point of compressing room and overhead mics is generally bring out everything that happens after the initial stick hit, not just the stick. That will make the whole drum kit sound bigger and give it more body.

Try starting your compression settings in a way that at first is a little counter intuitive: set your attack to it’s pretty long, say around 100-120ms; then make your release time faster than that, 40-60ms. The ration and threshold depend on the input signal, but don’t go crazy, look for around 5-8 db gain reduction, then boost your make-up gain to the top amount of gain reduction you’re getting. This will effectively boost everything that happens after the initial stick hit, but not give you the hard-core resonance increase that a hard limiter does as described net.

Extreme parallel compression / limiting.

If you have a very flat snare, try this to bring out some life. The goal is to isolate any ring (tone) that’s in the recording, then blend it back in with the original signal. To do that you need to double the signal and use a hard limiter.

Start by making a copy of the snare track, then solo the second one. Put a hard limiter on it so that it’s really, really squashed. It won’t sound good at all, but that’s OK for now, what you want is to get a lot of ring, like an industrial sort of sound. A hard limiter on a snare drum is get you MORE RING and resonance by limiting all of the other parts of the sound that’s “louder”. That means by blending that limited signal back in with the original track you can often fix a flat sounding snare. It’s very important, though, to set it as a hard limiter (not a soft limiter) to bring out the whatever ring might exists deep inside the signal that is being masked by all the rest of the sound. Also make sure to pay very close attention to any phase problems that can happen with this technique.

If all else fails, use Beat Detective (or the like) to fix timing issues; or slice tight and replace the regions with a sample. Massey also makes a drum replacement plugin that works pretty well.

How to trigger gate with snare drum: