Audio Recording Tips

In every rock and pop records, it is important to attain a loud snare and kick drums in the mix. However a more precise requirement is not being loud at all, but to mix it with DYNAMICS. If you are an engineer working on a mix, you should be able to mix it with dynamics. For example the 1st stanza is slow then, the intro drums to the chorus should be loud to bring in the dynamics and beat for the chorus. The purpose is to provide a sound hook to the listener in preparation for the chorus. This makes the song memorable especially if the sound hook is done great.

Or it can be done before the 1st stanza (in the song intro section), a very good example is Nirvana’s Smells Like Teens Spirit. The guitar intro sounds soft and medium. Yet a surprise snare and kick drum combination attached the listener to the main riff of the song. The result is a great and memorable drum hook as well as the associated guitar riff.This production technique is highly important in rock records, yet some bands particularly those with poor drummers are not good in adding dynamics to their drums, making the sound of the drums too mechanical and predictable.

If you have this kind of drummer, there is a good way to fix it in the mixing stage instead of repetitive re-recording process which can costly in terms of studio time. I call this technique as “doubling” process.

Doubling process is very simple, it is doubling the recorded wave in the same time duration. The result is the addition of resulting sound amplitudes which increases the volume. I use this technique only in some parts of the mix where I need the snare and kick drums to be very loud. For example below is result of the snare drum sound recording:

Now using doubling technique to naturally create loud snare is to simply duplicate the original snare drum and paste it in in the next track such as shown below AT THE EXACT TIME DURATION, INTERVAL AND ASSIGNMENT as the original wave (however creatively you can have them in “delay” but adding delay is more useful to create a “snare string sound like in a Cajon drum box” than making it purposely to be loud):

The result is the increased loudness of snare in that particular section of the mix. This is a more natural approach of creating specific loud drum sections instead of drowning the track with effects.