I was trying to get some sleep, but a thought came to me...
I'm liking all of these snare sounds and I was just thinking it would be even more educational if everyone could post how they got their results. What they used, how they used it and the settings they used, etc.
For example, Ngarjuna, I found it interesting that your snare has the least amount of room in it, yet the snare sound has as much body and physical impact as the others. What did you do to realise this result?
If anyone doesn't want to share, that's fine, but I would sure appreciate it.
In my case I used Blockfish, clamping it down as far as it would go and dialing in some saturation. Then I added the W1 limiter to contain the transients a bit and bring up the body of the snare. As far as eq, I just used the Sonitus eq and followed Kim's direction. In the end I was aiming to keep the snare out front and equal in energy with the Vocal, which is the reasoning behind my choice of level.
KVR Mix Workshop - Week 2: Snare
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- KVRAF
- 2844 posts since 1 Jan, 2003
Hey a7, great idea! I've got to sleep but I'll look at my project and settings and post when I wake up.
I think I used Voxengo GlissEQ, Wave Arts Trackplug, Ohmicide, and then G-VST G-Clip for a final squash.
I hope there are more posts here when I wake up.
I think I used Voxengo GlissEQ, Wave Arts Trackplug, Ohmicide, and then G-VST G-Clip for a final squash.
I hope there are more posts here when I wake up.
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- KVRist
- 46 posts since 20 Mar, 2008
Well, with the snare I diverged from Kim's instructions a bit because I like my snare to have some snap in it. I don't dislike Kim's vision of the snare in this example, but I wanted to see what would happen if I made it more to my tastes than his (and how he would react to that difference, since Kim's feedback has been sort of like a really well-informed client, a rarity around my studio heh). So I pretty much knew I wasn't going to end up with a result too close to the original when I approached it.
I'll have to load up the project later to get some exact settings for you, but basically I high passed it to kill the rumble, took some of the body out of the low mids, added some highs, and compressed (not in that order, I'll post the actual order when I re-consult, has been a week already since I did that). I used Voxengo Marquis as my compressor starting with one of the SSL-ish presets to set the various curves in a 'familiar' way, then I nudged attack and release to get my "usual" snare sound, let some of the transient in then clamp it down. I also don't recall how my threshold / ratio is set, I'll have to check that as well.
**Edit: I left out my "magic" step because I do this to everything nowadays...before I began with any of the above, I ran the track through Nebula for color. I believe I went with one of the SSL-ish programs (I've gotten sweet results with drums and bass material using those). I drive the input gain (one of the things that makes Nebula so amazing is that in addition to emulating a piece of hardware at one setting, you can actually use it to act like the hardware itself in some cases) 5-8 dB and reduce the digital gain by the same amount. I also generally (and I think I did this time as well) throw a Tape emulation program in there, also Nebula, so that it's something like Driven Preamp -> Tape -> less driven preamp. So it gets somewhat of a "slammed to tape" kind of sound before I ever start thinking about EQ or compression.
I'm happy enough with the result so far, but I do think (as Kim has advised me) the snare is going to have to come down in the mix. I was having trouble imagining the eventual balance of the kit overall so I didn't tweak the level of the snare very much yet, but when I add the rest of the kit I'm already figuring I will have to make some adjustments. However, because the snare is so snappy, I think it can come down a lot more without leaving the foreground. That's the theory, we'll see if it really works out as we keep adding material.
I'll have to load up the project later to get some exact settings for you, but basically I high passed it to kill the rumble, took some of the body out of the low mids, added some highs, and compressed (not in that order, I'll post the actual order when I re-consult, has been a week already since I did that). I used Voxengo Marquis as my compressor starting with one of the SSL-ish presets to set the various curves in a 'familiar' way, then I nudged attack and release to get my "usual" snare sound, let some of the transient in then clamp it down. I also don't recall how my threshold / ratio is set, I'll have to check that as well.
**Edit: I left out my "magic" step because I do this to everything nowadays...before I began with any of the above, I ran the track through Nebula for color. I believe I went with one of the SSL-ish programs (I've gotten sweet results with drums and bass material using those). I drive the input gain (one of the things that makes Nebula so amazing is that in addition to emulating a piece of hardware at one setting, you can actually use it to act like the hardware itself in some cases) 5-8 dB and reduce the digital gain by the same amount. I also generally (and I think I did this time as well) throw a Tape emulation program in there, also Nebula, so that it's something like Driven Preamp -> Tape -> less driven preamp. So it gets somewhat of a "slammed to tape" kind of sound before I ever start thinking about EQ or compression.
I'm happy enough with the result so far, but I do think (as Kim has advised me) the snare is going to have to come down in the mix. I was having trouble imagining the eventual balance of the kit overall so I didn't tweak the level of the snare very much yet, but when I add the rest of the kit I'm already figuring I will have to make some adjustments. However, because the snare is so snappy, I think it can come down a lot more without leaving the foreground. That's the theory, we'll see if it really works out as we keep adding material.
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- KVRist
- 46 posts since 20 Mar, 2008
For some reason, I didn't save a version of the project with the snare or vocal settings. Bad, ngarjuna, bad! I will be much more careful in weeks to come to make sure I do so as to share settings, as that is the whole point of doing this workshop. My habit is to chuck that stuff as the CPU load of an "actual" mix, were I to leave everything in place, would bring several DAWs crying to their knees.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 4692 posts since 28 Jan, 2003 from In these very interwebs
(edited original post to add text at bottom)
"Anyone is free to download the links and have a go for themselves. If you are serious about participating though, you should send me an email to workshop at kimlajoie dot com to get involved. Participants get access to all the audio tracks for mixing and private personal feedback from me on their work."
-Kim.
"Anyone is free to download the links and have a go for themselves. If you are serious about participating though, you should send me an email to workshop at kimlajoie dot com to get involved. Participants get access to all the audio tracks for mixing and private personal feedback from me on their work."
-Kim.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 4692 posts since 28 Jan, 2003 from In these very interwebs
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- KVRist
- 393 posts since 13 Jan, 2007
Hehe, bad Ngarjuna!
Thanks for the details. Did you use the Marquis compressor on the vocals too? I don't have alot of experience judging compression, but just comparing to everyones to each other, your vocal compression sounds very clean.
Thanks for the details. Did you use the Marquis compressor on the vocals too? I don't have alot of experience judging compression, but just comparing to everyones to each other, your vocal compression sounds very clean.
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- KVRist
- 95 posts since 19 Jul, 2006 from Lowell, MA
Thanks for the compliments on the snare 
EQ was what Kim suggested, but also I added a very tight Q band pass filter at the 1st and 2nd harmonic of the snare ring. I opened them up, and lowered them until I thought it was barely believable.
I squashed it to death with the compressor. I think I used a 1:60 ratio and a very low threshold (-30db?) Attack was just big enough to let about half of the transient through. Long release time.
For saturation I used Cristortion to give it more high end, and to take care of big transients from the makeup gain on the compressor.
The trick that probably makes the tail nice and long is reverb. That may have been cheating at this stage.
When I add it to the next track I will gate the attack a little to give it more smack. Also, as Kim mentioned, I need to get the EQ working better for the mix. It's too heavy in the low mids.
-Steve
EQ was what Kim suggested, but also I added a very tight Q band pass filter at the 1st and 2nd harmonic of the snare ring. I opened them up, and lowered them until I thought it was barely believable.
I squashed it to death with the compressor. I think I used a 1:60 ratio and a very low threshold (-30db?) Attack was just big enough to let about half of the transient through. Long release time.
For saturation I used Cristortion to give it more high end, and to take care of big transients from the makeup gain on the compressor.
The trick that probably makes the tail nice and long is reverb. That may have been cheating at this stage.
When I add it to the next track I will gate the attack a little to give it more smack. Also, as Kim mentioned, I need to get the EQ working better for the mix. It's too heavy in the low mids.
-Steve
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- KVRist
- 46 posts since 20 Mar, 2008
Erm...uh...did I mention I'm taking REALLY good notes this week?Did you use the Marquis compressor on the vocals too?
I don't recall exactly, but chances are I used the Nebula 747 compressor program. I usually start with that on vocals and guitars and the like when I want some light leveling compression. I tend to use Marquis for more drum type program material. The Nebula compressors currently are a little quirky, as Nebula doesn't 100% react the way you'd expect a compressor to (there's no envelope follower in their sampler, so I'm guessing these few compressor programs were hand coded). But it's nice on material I don't want to just outright squash sometimes. Usually I start there, if that isn't working for me I move on to Marquis or sometimes ReaComp depending.
I'll have real settings for the coming weeks, I promise!
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- KVRAF
- 1666 posts since 28 Jun, 2007 from Amazon rain forest
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 4692 posts since 28 Jan, 2003 from In these very interwebs
This may or may not help, but if you're thinking of the kick, I used am-pulse. It's not free, and it's not a straight exciter. It's got an interesting saturation circuit too, which I boosted to the maximum 36dB. I didn't use the transient shaping controls.yonyz wrote:Does anyone have a recommendation for a free harmonic exciter plugin?
It's for the third week work..
-Kim.