Mixing Snare

for more attack you can go a few different ways. One is to use a compressor with a bit of attack time (10-50 ms) and quick release. Adjust the ratio and make up gain so that the first part of the snare hit goes by uncompressed (due to attack time) then the compressor kicks in and attentuates the rest of the it. Another thing to consider is you might look at all the drum tracks with the screen zoomed in to very high horizontal zoom. You can drag the tracks around (adjust the delay) so that the snare hit lines up in all tracks. (While you have the tracks magnified, check to see that all tracks are in phase as well.) This process removes any smear in the snare hits, but can adversely impact phasing on the other mics. Your mix doesn't sound that bad. I might use an eq bring up the snares a bit and attenuate the resonance of the snare itself.
 
Another thing to try is the same compression trick (above) with a multiband compressor. This way you can control the lengths of the snares sound (the rattle) and the fundamental of the drum seperately. One trick I use on occasion is to double (copy the track) the snare track, then pitch shift the copy up or down (depending on what I'm going after). I then mix the two together. If you have a transient shaper plug, it's worth giving it a try as well. For drum ambience I usually go for a nice room sound (fairly subtle) unless it's a backing track for a ballad.

good call skull

Thank you all for the tips.

If you need all the tracks he it is: http://www.4shared.com/fi...1915/f410969/Song.html

I'm trying to take the best I can from the drums, and then go to other instruments.

Thanks.

Agreeing with Mike on this. I'm amazed at the difference in tonality between A & B. I can't believe it's the same snare actually. Whatever processing you're using take it off completely and start over. Try a mix with just the unprocessed snare sound and see what you get.

If I could not just do a retake I might try to EQ boost a narrow band of mid freq to give the snare some bite.

Set up a steep Q filter and sweep across to see if there is any resonance to emphasize.

Lay of the gate. Let the reverb work on the lower freqs as well as the highs.

Remember, the compressor is sort of counter acting the gate.

I'd avoid the gate and compress less... just as a matter of habit.

best,
mike

It sounds to me like one of the biggest problems here is that you're relying too much on the close mics to get your snare sounding right, when you should be using a combination of the OH mics, room mics, and close mics.

EVERYTHING on that mix sounds overcompressed to me.  I think one of your problems is that you're killing your transients with the compression.  Take it all off....the compression and the gates...and start the mix over.  That's what I'd do.

Here you go, see how this works.

The gating has pretty well eliminated the hats.

EQ: The LF at 100Hz with a fairly high Q cleans the sound up well. A high shelving boost at around 3500 gives a bright wire sound. The setting at 2 will give a fuller sound. The setting at 3 gives more belly and wire. The setting at 4 gives more crack (800-1000Hz).

I didn't thnk compression was needed, the gating has done enough.

Brett

http://tetsuo.gol.ad.jp/snare.wav