the next most important microphone to me is the snare top again we've already
looked at the EQ and the gate if you remember from earlier here's our gate
that really makes the snare nice and tight and gets rid of the extra ghost
notes this is our little bit of body so we've already done quite a bit to this
but I'm going to go ahead and EQ just a little more and again this kind of goes
back to when I've been mixing on the console I'm used to having a Neve style
EQ for all my drums so I'm going to go ahead and use one and here's one
developed by some fantastic engineer and again I don't remember his name but he
really helped out with this plugin it's a model of a Neve 1073 very similar in
style to the 31 102 we were using on the kick drum slightly different frequencies
and also because it's a different model done by a different company it's going
to have different characteristics no matter how close it is to the actual EQ
now this being a snare drum I can assume I really don't need to have anything
below 50 to 80 Hertz so the first thing I'm going to do is play with the
high-pass filter so let's go ahead and engage it and see how high we can go
before we start losing stuff on the snare drum
so I think this works really well at around 80 Hertz I'm just going to bypass
and put it back what's interesting is again I'm not just cutting off
everything down in the range below 80 Hertz I'm having a slope but I also have
a corner and I'm actually hearing a little bit of a bump at the corner which
you do get there's a little bit of phase shift in resonance when the filter
starts and I feel like I actually pick up some body by filtering at 80 Hertz so
here's with here's without it's a subtle thing but I like it so I'm going to go
ahead and now I'm just going to start cranking the top-end EQ and I already
know from you queueing thousands of snare drums that generally I like 7.2 in
the mid band and this shelf is fixed at 12 K so I'm going to have a 12 K shelf
and a seven point two parametric made band and just start cranking them until
they sound good to me okay in isolation that's starting to sound pretty good but
what I'm noticing is even with that extra body that I feel like I want to
add more so we've got an EQ that was in the session centered around 200 Hertz I
know for me cueing with my knee V Hughes that the 220 band in the lower shelf
works really well in a snare drum especially in combination with this
high-pass filter so I'm going to go ahead and add some body here now you
might be saying okay you've added highs and lows so why didn't you just turn it
up and the reason is because I've only added highs and lows and I am actually
putting a little bit of a happy face EQ and there's nothing wrong with a happy
face EQ if I just made this louder what would start to happen is the snare would
still disappear I'm a fan of really bright snare
drums that have a lot of body to them and what that means is you're leaving
the mid-range behind I could have gotten the same sort of effect by using a more
precision EQ and taking out some mid-range but that's not as musical to
me I like adding the frequencies that sound good and taking away frequencies
that sound bad I don't ever think about taking away frequencies that I don't
like as much to make the other frequencies stand out
so here's within without this entire EQ okay kind of night and day this is
really starting to sound like ooh that's a snare that could be on a record now
one other thing that this particular plug-in has and the reason I chose it
over let's say the 31 102 or some of the other Neve models is there's quite a bit
of modeling of how the input transformer breaks down as you start to hit it with
more level and that's why we have an input fader here so what I'm going to do
is link the input and output fader so as I turn one up the other goes down so
that my level is actually matched so I don't fool myself I just making it
louder and I'm going to start cranking up the input and see if I get a little
bit of harmonic distortion which is always a good thing on snare it's subtle
it's subtle but I like it it's actually starting to build up in that same area
of body that weary queuing in in this lower mid-range band we can do that even
more by turning up this preamp here so we can turn this up a little bit and see
if we like it it's subtle it's subtle but I don't particularly like that I
think we're just going to go ahead put this back at the default value but leave
this input cranked so here is the snare drum just with the input gain cranked up
a little bit here's at the default setting
here's with a cranked again now this is a subtle difference so where I think
it's easiest to hear is in the body of the snare so down in that sort of 200
Hertz range and it really I mean body I think is a really good word when you
listen to it loud it's the thing that thumps you in the chest so listen down
there and it's again it's a very subtle difference and it's not enough of a
difference for me so after you check this out we're going to go even one step
further here it is again and without and back in okay