Snare Samples

This Day we focused on getting some drum samples, we were aiming to get some particulally clean and characterful samples from a black panther snare. Our first decision was to remove as much from the room as possible; we removed all of the cymbals and toms and dampened the kick drum by putting a coat over it. We then tuned the snare and put 2 pieces of moon gell on it. This didn’t quite have the effect we wanted so we also put the leather cases of an SM57 on the top skin. This had the snare sounding good in the room when given a reasonable whack.

Next we took a range of microphones from the technical store achieve the sound we wanted. We took out the following:

2x Shure SM57

1x Beyerdynamic M201

2x Coles 4038

2x AKG C414b (Stereo Matched)

The samples we eventually took were from an SM57 on the snare top. Wide, evenly spaced 414s as overheads, 1 Coles as a 3^rd, central overhead, and the final Coles as a room mic at the far end of the room. After some adjustments we found positions that we were all happy with. All microphones went through the API pre amplifiers then into the Audient mixing desk. All microphones were EQ’ed on input on the mixing desk, we compressed the snare top and mono room microphones on input using an WA2A and A76 respectively. All the while we made small adjustments to the EQ to achieve the sound we wanted. Most of the sound that we felt would form our final snare sound came from the overheads and the room microphone, the snare top close mic acted more as a way of adding punch to the final sound.

We made our recording of samples in the last 20 minutes of our recording session taking 5 high velocity hits, 5 medium velocity hits and 5 rim shots. All of which are available on the downloads page.