About the Author: Andrew Riches is a professional audio engineer and writes a blog at CobaltAudio.com for anyone interested in recording at home.
Getting the snare drum to sit right in your mix is a critical component to get right for a great drum sound. The majority of audio engineers will choose two close mics on the snare, one above and one below. The top gives you a lot of the initial attack of the drum, as well as most of the tone. The lower mic is mostly to bring out the sound of the actual snare, and will also contribute to some of the tone and sustain.
So how do you treat these mics in the mix beyond the basic eq and dynamics?
Relative Phase
Before you start eq’ing snare mics, be sure to check their phase first. As the top skin moves further away from the top mic when the drum is hit, the bottom skin moves closer to the bottom mic. In short, the two mics are out of phase with each other so when you mix them together some frequencies will cancel out. Don’t just hit the phase invert in your eq plugin and forget it, it’s important to listen to how it changes the tone because although some of the time the phase cancellation will result in a thinner sounding snare, it can also produce some useful results. For example, if the snare has a pronounced ring to it then the cancellation might help with that. In some cases it may just sound nicer with the phase one way or the other, there is no hard and fast rule here so long as you check.
Refer To Your Overheads
It’s all too easy to get caught up in compressing and eq’ing the top snare mic to get it to sound great, but when you put it back into context with the mix, all the life seems to go out of it. This is because the overheads should make up a significant amount of your final snare sound. So, if you fade them up when you’re checking close mic phase or eq, you can be sure you don’t do more harm than good. They are also a really good reference point to listen to on their own, to make sure you have really got the best out of the snare sound and that it’s not too compressed or over eq’d.
Reverb
It can cover a multitude of sins, but reverb should be one of the last things you put into your snare sound. If you put it in too soon, you can easily get distracted by listening to the reverb tail rather than the sound of the actual drum. For me, snare drums really show up the difference between an average reverb and a one that’s really nice, smooth and full. A decent plate reverb driven by the close snare mics is a good bet in most applications, whereas the default “medium-hall” reverb plugin just won’t measure up. Finally as a very simple rule of thumb, too little reverb is much less noticeable than too much.
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