Gated snare and Sidechaining technique

The Harmonic Series:

A1, A2, E3, A3, C#4, E4, G4, A4, B4, C#5
(Octave, P5th, P4th, M3, m3, M2, M2, M2)

Formants are bands of those parts of the harmonic series that are emphasized or de-emphasized. There are many variables that can change the timbre of an instrument, but the formants stay the same. Formants are a sort of template for a voice, or any instrument. The proximity effect is something that can attenuate or enhance certain frequencies, wanted or unwanted, along with the various frequency curves for each type of microphone. Our physical make up as humans differentiate us from one another, and gives us our own unique timbre, and unique set of formants. The different wood, screws, glue, neck, and the way the whole instrument was put together gives different instruments their unique set of formants. Rather than timbre changing, the tone varies by the emphasis and de-emphasis of different formants.

GATED SNARE techniques

We will use a room mic (Royer 122) recording the whole kit in mono. After tracking, align the the closed mic’ed snare with the snare hit in the room mic. Send a bus to the mono mic from the close mic’ed snare. The gate on the mono mic will open up the room mic for a huge drum sound.
Send the top snare on bus17 to an aux with its input bus17. Put on an EQ, reverb, compressor, and gate in that order.
Use the EQ to shape the sound of the snare that is going into the reverb using a high pass filter. The reverb creates an artificial room sound you didn’t get when you recorded mono with the snare. In terms of gain staging, the reverbs input should be less than 0db to avoid distortion. The decay on the reverb controls how long the sound will persist, while the gate’s hold function determines the amount of time the gate will be open.
Create a new audio track or duplicate the track. Copy the snare and label “fake snare”. Strip silence the region and add fades. This track will be used as a tool to open/close the gate and compressor by acting as a trigger for the processors. Bus this track to the same bus that the sidechaining region in the gate is being sent on. Make sure you have a gate on the correct track that you want the gate to trigger when the snare drum sounds. If you use EQ as a sidechain, it tells the compressor a certain range of frequencies to compress. Just about all gates have sidechain filters, and some engineers use this and bypass the gate, using it as an EQ. When using a gated snare technique, make sure that the hold is set to the right amount of time so that the snare doesn’t sound for too short or too long. It really depends on the tempo of the song.