Snare Drum EQ, Compression and Panning Mixing Tips

One of the most powerful elements in the rock drum mixing session are the snare drums. In fact, great rock songs are often associated with unique snare drum sound which we often remember throughout the years.

Snare drum mixing of the music by Led Zeppelin, The Outfield, Spin Doctors and Nirvana are my personal favorites because they sound loud, crispy, heavy and well mixed. Modern pop beat sadly puts less importance in drums particularly snare. But a well mixed snare drums can make the song worth remembering, so what are the EQ, compression and panning mixing tips for snare drums?

This tutorial puts more emphasis on rock music more than other genre like pop, jazz and country. The objective is to give the snare drums a great and loud sound.

Working with a properly recorded snare drum

The first key to having a good sounding snare in the mix is to have it recorded properly. The recording objective should be:

1. No clipping or distortion. Personally I have mixed projects with clipped snare drums. This results to distortion that sounds very bad. So there is no way to fix that during the mix and it needs to be re-recorded.

2. No extreme or disturbing bleeding noises from other drum instruments. (read: “Two Methods to Control Sound Bleeding in Multitrack Recording”

3. At least recorded at a reasonable sounding level with dynamics.

4.) Drum recording environment plays a big role in the resulting snare drum sound. For example, if you record drums in the center of the spacious big hall, the snare drum sound would have much more ambiance and reverb than recording in a heavily carpeted and concrete small rooms.

There are lots of factors influencing the sound of your snare. Refer to the following important tutorials to learn some techniques on how to properly record your drums:

Drum Mixing Tips and Techniques for Modern Rock Music -learn some ways on how you should be putting microphones on your snare drum. This will have a profound effect on the resulting sound.

Assuming you are on a budget, and would like to get a great drum sound out of 4 or even two microphones:

How to Record Drums with 4 mics

Recording & Mixing Drums using only Two Microphones

Reaper DAW Tutorial on Drum Recording– if you are using Reaper to record drums. This is a very useful tutorial for you.

You should also pay attention to the recording levels of the snare to prevent clipping (or distortion) as well as very poor S/N (signal to noise ratio). In rock music production, snare is commonly hit hard by the drummer which can easily overload your analog to digital converters. To make sure you are recording at optimum levels; you need to implement proper gain staging.

If you are using snare drum samples and not from actual drum kit recording; you need to make sure you are properly working with a high resolution audio samples (such as 24-bits). You can use great sounding drum sampler like Superior Drummer 2.0, etc.

EQ settings for snare

Let’s start with the most important, the EQ. It is important to know that EQ settings for snare drum mixing are treated differently between each song. There is no set of standard for EQ settings; however you can categorize them as follows (you can select on the following settings depending on your mixing application):

Heavy snare with crispy snare string sound:

Boost +3dB 100Hz, Q= 1.0
Cut -6dB 2000Hz Q= 1.4
Boost +3dB 8000 Hz Q = 1.0

Dominant and crispy snare sound

Cut -3dB 200Hz Q= 1.0
Boost 3dB 8000Hz Q=1.0

Since the following settings uses Q, you need a parametric equalizer to implement those settings. Bear in mind that the “dominant and crispy snare sound” is recommended only for instrumental rock music since 2000Hz – 3000Hz frequency range are not cut. If these are used in music with vocals, the snare drum may drowned the vocal frequencies affecting vocal clarity.

Snare Compression- How the sound changes with different settings

The second are the compression settings which I already mentioned in this tutorial: “Audio compression tips for mixing”.

Attack: 20ms
Release: 40ms
Threshold: -12dB
Compression ratio: 5:1

Feel free to experiment the attack and release settings. The compression ratio can also be set to 4:1 depending on your flavor. Lastly the panning settings; most engineers can pan the snare drums at the center. But in reality the snare drums are not perfectly located in the center of the mix. When you visualize the real drums, it is a little off-center. So I recommend to use 6.25 units to the right. In your mixing software, an instrument panned to the right will have a positive sign while panned to the left is negative, so it will be +6.25. More details are discussed in this tutorial: “How to pan drum instruments”.

The examples below illustrates how the snare drum sound changes with 5 different compression settings. This is a useful guide for a beginner in choosing the best compression settings for the snare. Let’s get started with the default settings (original and uncompressed snare):

This is how the snare waveform looks like “uncompressed”:

Supposing you want to apply this first compression setting:

-30.4dB threshold
2:1 Compression ratio
Scan mode: RMS
Smooth saturation: Yes
Attack time: 5ms
Release time: 10ms
Output gain: 7.6dB

The threshold depends on the peak of the snare drum; feel free to experiment to get the optimum threshold. The compressor that I’m using is the Sony Wave Hammer. This is the resulting sound:

The snare drum sounds scratchy. It adds more character to snare drum wires and also the snare drum sounds a bit sustain more than the original. Although this sound is not as thick as the other compression settings to be illustrated later on. If you need your snare drum to sound like this. You can start implementing the above settings. The output gain is adjustable depending on your desired snare drum volume. This is how the waveform looks like for the first setting:

Comparing with the uncompressed wave, compressing with very fast attack time and release time results to less energy at the maximum peak of the snare drum; as you have noticed that peak section is now thinner compared with the uncompressed snare. Let’s try this second setting:

-30.4dB threshold
4:1 Compression ratio
Scan mode: RMS
Smooth saturation: Yes
Attack time: 5ms
Release time: 100ms
Output gain: 7.6dB

The second setting has very fast attack time but slow release time. It also uses moderate compression ratio of 4:1. This is how the snare drum sounds like:

This is one of the common snare sounds in the 80’s new wave. A highly compressed snare emphasizing its metallic sounds more than the body. With some reverb technique, you can actually produce a gated snare sound which is popular in that period. This is how the waveform looks like:

The peak section looks very compressed (as evident by very thin peaks showing less energy). It is because the attack time is set to short and the release time sets to slow. The compression ratio of 4:1 is strong enough to compress those peaks effectively. Let’s try this third setting:

-30.4dB threshold
4:1 Compression ratio
Scan mode: RMS
Smooth saturation: Yes
Attack time: 100ms
Release time: 100ms
Output gain: 4.5dB

This is moderate compression with attack and release time set to a same value. This is how it sounds like:

The snare drum hits are prominent and strong with little sustain. This is one of the snare drum type sound used in alternative music. As a result if the attack time is set to slow with slow release time, the snare drum sounds powerful. Here is the waveform of this setting:

You will notice that there are more energies concentrated in the peak section of the snare. This is why it sounds stronger than the other compressed examples. Comparing with the uncompressed sound, the third setting has a better “snare body” sound. Now let’s try this fourth setting:

-30.4dB threshold
7.5:1 Compression ratio
Scan mode: RMS
Smooth saturation: Yes
Attack time: 100ms
Release time: 10ms
Output gain: 6dB

In this setting, the attack time is set to slow and the release time is very fast. The compression ratio is also deep at 7.5:1; this is how the snare drum sounds like at this setting:

Actually this sounds similar to the third sound, it has great snare body sound and hits. It is also as powerful as the third setting. One slight difference I have noticed that it’s more sustained than the third setting. This is how the waveform looks like:

As you have observed some energies are spread are towards the end of the waveform, it is why it sound a bit sustain. Finally this is the fifth setting:

-30.4dB threshold
5:1 compression ratio
Scan mode: RMS
Smooth saturation: yes
Attack time: 20ms
Release time: 40ms

The compression ratio is set to medium with slower attack and faster release time. This gives the snare some scratchy yet powerful sound:

Personally, I will use this setting for compressing snare in punk drum tracks. This is how the waveform looks like:

The peak has a lot of energy yet you can also see some of the energy being distributed throughout the waveform contributing to some sustain.

Final recommendation: The settings above are not meant to be the final solution, I recommend to highly rely on your ear to tweak the settings further to create a great snare sound in your mix starting with the settings provided above.

Add more punch by using parallel compression

Parallel compression as the name implies is running a compressor parallel to the original signal. To understand this very easily; look at the schematic below:

As you can see, your original drum tracks signal and compressed drum signal are mixed together to produce a loud and fat drum sound. Why compress in parallel?

1.) First, if you compress the original signal directly (not in parallel) – you are taking away precious dynamics from the recording. These are the “loud” and “soft” parts of the drum recording that makes the music very exciting to listen. Compression reduces the dynamic range of the recording.

If you want to learn why, you can read this tutorial on dynamic range compression.

2.) By compressing in parallel, you retain the original drum recording dynamics while taking advantage of “compressed” and “loud” drum sound. Compressed sounds are loud because the soft parts in the drum recording are made to be loud while the loud parts stays loud. If you mix the compressed and original drum recording, the resulting sound is loud while retaining the important dynamics.

To do parallel compression, you can follow the steps below:

1.) Create a new track in your DAW mix.
2.) Route the input of your original drum recording to this new track. You can do this by making an auxiliary connection. This feature is usually available in most DAW.
3.) Now in the aux track, add a compressor.
4.) Set the compressor threshold, ratio, attack and release time as follows:

a.) Set the compression ratio starting at 4:1
b.) Attack time at 0.5ms
c.) Release time at 30ms

Listen to the parallel compressed track, now slowly lower the threshold from 0dB to -6dB , then to -15dB ,etc until you reach the optimal loudness while not squashing the result.

You can even experiment with slower attack time and faster release or with a very high compression ratio to make the output really compressed and loud. Listen to the mix and see how the settings are affecting the resulting drum sound. If you are using REAPER, you can read this parallel compression tutorial.

If you have other great tips in mixing snare drums, feel free to share. Thanks.

Content last updated on October 13, 2012