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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.

In our first time at bat on these Sonic Deconstruction articles, the song choice appears to be a swing and a miss on the recording techniques day. A calamitous choice for one simple reason: almost everything is a sample, loop, or synth! As a result, recording methods aren’t immediately intuitive in the way that King of Leon or Foo Fighters would be. It also doesn’t help that the one track that undoubtedly existed at one point in the real acoustic world (as opposed to tracks that could have been DI’ed or midi triggered) is the vocal track and frankly it doesn’t sound very good. But this is our dishwashing liquid and dammit, we’re going to soak in it.

Recorded at Dave Fridmann’s residential studio in upstate New York, MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular is probably the ideal album to record there. In his September 2000 article in Sound on Sound Magazine, Dave intimated that the design of Tarbox Road Studios is somewhat less than ideal:

The design work required to turn the house into a studio was taken on by Dave himself, who felt that the recommendations of a professional studio designer would in any case be beyond his means…

‘When people are normally doing acoustical design they’re worried about a lot of isolation, and worried about floating floors and cement structures to isolate you from each other. And I was worried about it, but I really couldn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t worry too much, just did what I could.’

Like many residential type facilities—professional, pro-sumer, or hobbyist—isolation is a concern. So when big bands come in wanting to track everything live you often get so much bleed that you lose flexibility in your tracks. Your guitars are in your drums, your drums are in your vocals, you can’t change one without leaving some ghostly artifact somewhere else. Well with a band like MGMT that consists exclusively of two musicians playing instruments that could very well exist entirely in the box, those issues are no longer a concern.

It is my belief that at least a few of the synthesizers were amped or re-amped for mixing. There is a lot of dirt and grit on the synthesizers, especially when compared with the infantile clarity of the sounds in the EP version, which makes me think that amp gain, color, and distortion are part of the sound. There is an audible grime on the melody synth that is evident when the keyboardist lands on that C# that holds for a measure. It almost sounds like that kind of battered old Leslie cabinet.

The vocals are an interesting beast—they are exceedingly sibilant to my ear, which could very well be a combination of mixing and mastering (provided by Greg Calbi). This assaulting high frequency presence might indicate that Fridmann used a hi-fi mic on a less-than-hi-fi singer. I know that his favorite mic is his tube U-47 (one of my personal favorites as well), so he might’ve used that old standby. On a singer with an unpolished and young voice like in MGMT, I likely would’ve opted for a dynamic microphone with a bigger, heavier diaphragm to compensate for the vocal character like the SM7. These mics have the effect of covering up the less audible imperfections that might otherwise be present when a tube mic is used. Either way, the vocals are heavily processed with filters, fuzz, compressors, and fx so the original character of the vocal as interpreted through the microphone is likely lost except on the multitrack file.

By and large, the greatest assets to the sounds on the record would be the mixing techniques. Check back on Friday for some in-depth speculation. Dave, if you’re reading, feel free to set us straight!

I am privy to a wide variety of recorded sessions here at Fix Your Mix and they range from pristinely tracked in an expensive, multi-million landmark to recorded in a dumpster in Cleveland with a Yak-Bak and a plastic cup with a string attached to it.  If my clients have any struggles with their recordings, chances are they struggle with recording drums.

When it comes to drum tracks, intuitive recording practices, which govern most of the semi-professional sphere, have been negatively impacted by two forces—synthesizers/samplers and live sound reinforcement. Both of these domains hold isolation as one of the paramount objectives, but the philosophy of isolation at all costs can cause drum sounds to suffer greatly.

The idea that a MIDI keyboard can produce distinct drum tracks—snare, kick, left crash, right crash, etc.—has prompted many home recordists to try and recreate that isolation in their acoustic drum recordings. This presents numerous problems beyond the scope of a daily blog, but namely, it produces an overall lack of unity and fullness in the rhythm tracks.

Venue live miking techniques also favor isolation. There is a significant focus on kick drums and snare drums and the rest is kind of left to chance. Overheads are turned down as quietly as possible because they are the farthest away from the acoustic sound source and therefore have the highest likelihood of producing feedback or picking up bleed from other instruments.

Now I will concede that I am a small fish in the pond of professional audio, but if I am known for anything, it is for being able to make a great drum sound. Big-and-ballsy or piercing-and-pretty, the essential elements to great drum sounds are indisputably the overheads. These mikes often get ignored in the aforementioned situations. They are relegated to picking up cymbal sounds and aren’t utilized to their fullest potential. In acoustic drum miking, the overheads are absolutely the most crucial piece in creating the perfect drum sound.

In academic fields, my drum miking technique would be referred to as “Accent Miking.” For me, the term carries the connotation that something should exist as a baseline and something else should function as an accent. After all, you can’t really accentuate something unless something else is unaccented.

So in the instance of drum miking in a somewhat contained environment, the overheads create the preponderance of your drum sound. Then the individual mics for the various component pieces in the set provide accents to complement and augment the sonics of that foundation. It is my opinion that you should spend the largest portion of your time finding the perfect overhead sound, striving for something that could feasibly stand on its own without any further tracks. That is the glue that will hold all the other tracks together as well as provide substance.

All the other mikes are subsidiary to the overheads. Don’t get me wrong, snare drums and kick drums are important, but these tracks are designed to accent the overall sound, not create the foundation for it. Rather than saying “I will create my drum sound by the summation of all the individual tracks” try saying “I will create my drum sound by creating the perfect sound with the overheads and supplementing with the individual tracks.”

Use the discrete snare and kick tracks to treat parts of the kit separately. Maybe you want the snare to have a little reverb and the kick to be a little more present. Process those specific tracks independently to accomplish that, but always mix them back in so that they round out the overhead sound rather than overpower it.

Our intuitions can be misinformed by the evidence of our eyes (in live venues) and experience (in MIDI programming). To that end, it is important to understand the purpose of overhead mikes and the critical role they play in forming the ideal drum sound. By adjusting your philosophical approach to the individual drum tracks, it will be all the easier to create cohesive and pleasing drum sounds.