FIX YOUR MIX .com » BLOG

The snare drum is an instrument that receives a lot of interest in the mixing stage.  Prince famously said that the most important things in a mix are “the boom and the slap.”  Many people like their snares “thuddy” while others prefer “punchy.”  One term that I hear a lot is “poppy” and unlike the previous terms, poppy implies a very specific effect.

First, let’s agree on our nomenclature.  I use the term poppy to mean something that sounds like it is popping, i.e. “I want this snare to really pop here.”  This is not expressly talking about the kind of snare drum found in typical pop music (although many of the snare drums in pop music might be described as poppy).

What sonic qualities do you think of when you pop a balloon with a needle?  It’s loud, it’s sudden, and it’s short (that’s what she said…).  So in terms of an audio waveform, something described as poppy should theoretically contain a lot of initial transients and then go away relatively quickly.

You can achieve this effect in a number of ways.  One way is to use single-ply heads on the snare drum.  A thinner drumhead takes less energy to excite and has less dampening.  Of course thinner heads, especially on snare drums, aren’t well equipped to take the kind of beating most rock drummers would apply and not everyone wants to go to the trouble of changing drumheads every time they want a certain effect.  Furthermore, thinner heads tend to ring longer so it doesn’t create the sudden shortness that we are after.

Another way might be to use an exciter or transient shaper.  These are somewhat more obscure pieces of audio gear and not everyone has access to them or would know how to use them properly.  A much simpler way is to simply use a compressor.

As you are probably aware, a compressor is a form of Automatic Gain Control.  If are in charge of managing the volume of the track, you’d sit at the mixer with your finger on the fader and listen; if the sound got just a little too loud, you’d turn the fader down just a bit.  When the sound returns to normal, you push the fader back up to the starting position.  If the sound got wayyyyy too loud, you’d turn the fader down a whole bunch, then go back to the starting position.

Compressors can do all that for you.  But as in the example, there is going to be some amount of time between your ear recognizing something is too loud and your finger being able to execute the gain control on the fader.  Compressors generally have the same problem in reaction time.

Of course nowadays we have all kinds of cool things in the digital domain like lookahead limiters which can actually see what’s coming from an audio level standpoint and apply the proper compression necessary so that the compression is relatively inaudible. 

But in the analog world, no compressor is a look-ahead (without using a whole lot of analog rigmarole involving delays and such that I won’t go in to).  That means that there is ALWAYS window between the initial sound getting to the compressor and the compressor kicking in that passes signal through the compressor untouched by the AGC.  This window is adjusted by the “Attack Time” knob on the compressor, but no matter how fancy an analog compressor is, the Attack Time is always going to be greater than zero.

So if you imagine patching a compressor into a snare drum track with the threshold relatively low with the ratio relatively high, the snare drum will sound and for a brief moment the attack transients will get through untouched, almost as though there is no compressor in the chain, before the compressor snaps in and reduces the level.

This has an interesting effect because those first few transients will always be at full volume since no analog compressor can operate fast enough to catch them.  No matter how hard you squish and flatten the snare drum, in the analog world some will always get through untouched.

Of course you don’t need to have analog gear to accomplish this, any analog compressor emulator will do the trick as well as any digital compressor not set in look-ahead, soft limit, or brick wall mode.

So this window provides that initial explosion of attack transients.  When the compressor kicks in, the snare drum suddenly drops in level making the snare drum appear to be shorter in duration.  You can add in reverb or even make the threshold higher so that the snare drum doesn’t drop drastically in level, but the point is to use the compressor to accentuate initial transients.

This effect was popular in the 70s and 80s and can really make a snare drum cut through the mix without overtaking it.  Instead of focusing the ear on a grand legato snare drum with a half second decay time—which might sound over the rest of the band—the mind is instantly focused on those first few transients that occur in literally hundredths of a second and then get out of the way.  Like I mentioned in my comments on Keith’s blog post about Claps and Snaps, shorter rhythmic sounds focus the ear on the exactitude of the beat causing your attention to snap suddenly to the meter of the tune rather than rounding everything out and blending many things together.

If any of you dear readers have any sonic descriptors you’d like me to analyze, feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to sort it out for you.