You never know where you'll find inspiration. As I was trying not to listen to the background music in my local supermarket, She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals-a song from over 30 years ago!-earwormed its way into my brain. Check it out at https://youtu.be/UtvmTu4zAMg.
My first thought was they sure don't make snare drum sounds like those any more. But hey, we have Studio One! Surely there's a way to do that-and there is. The basic idea is to extract a trigger from a snare, use it to drive the Mai Tai synth, then layer it to enhance the snare.
Skeptical? Check out the audio example.
ISOLATING THE SNARE
If you're dealing with a drum loop or submix, you first need to extract the snare sound.
Create an FX Channel, and insert a Pro EQ followed by a Gate.
Add a pre-fader send from your mixed drums to the FX Channel. Aside from providing a more consistent level for triggering, a pre-fader send lets you turn down the main drum track. This way you hear only the FX Channel, which makes it easier to tweak the EQ and isolate the snare.
With the Gate bypassed, tune the Pro EQ to the snare frequency. Use the LC and HC with a 48 dB/octave slope to provide the preliminary isolation, then use a super-sharp bandpass setting to zero in on the snare frequency (Figure 1). The EQ's background spectrum analyzer can help by making sure the bar in the range you're boosting goes as high as possible. In stubborn cases, you may need to double up the bandpass filter with a second sharp bandpass filter.
Figure 1: Use the Pro EQ and Gate to extract a snare drum trigger.
Enable the gate, and click on Active to enable the trigger output. Set the Note and Velocity as desired (however when using noise with Mai Tai, the specific Note isn't that critical). Adjust the Gate's settings so that it triggers on the snare hits. Like the Pro EQ, the controls here are critical as well.
A short attack is usually best.
Keep release relatively short (e.g., 10 ms), unless you want to mix in some of the peaked/gated sound from this channel along with the Mai Tai and drums.
Hold times around 50 ms can help prevent false triggering. But you can also get creative with this control. If you don't want to trigger on hits that are close together (e.g., fills), a long Hold time will trigger on the first snare of the series, but ignore subsequent ones that fall within the hold time.
Insert the Mai Tai. Set its input to Gate, and enable the mixer's Monitor button. Figure 2 shows the finished track layout.
Figure 2: Track layout for snare drum extraction.
TWEAKING THE MAI TAI
Now the fun begins! Figure 3 shows a typical starting point for a snare-enhancing sound.
Figure 3: Starting point for a cool snare drum sound with Mai Tai.
The reason for choosing Mai Tai as the sound source is because of its Character options that, along with the filter controls, noise Color control, and FX (particularly Reverb, EQ, and Distortion), produce a huge variety of electronic snare sounds. The Character module's Sound and Amount controls are particularly helpful. The more you play with the controls, the more you'll start to understand just how many sounds are possible.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
If the snare is on a separate track, then you don't need the Pro EQ or FX Channel. Just insert a Gate in the snare track, enable the Gate's trigger output, and adjust the Gate Threshold controls to trigger on each snare drum hit. The comments above regarding the Attack, Release, and Hold controls apply here as well.
Nor are you limited to snare. You can isolate the kick drum, and trigger a massive, low-frequency sine wave from the Mai Tai to give those car door-vibrating kick drums. Toms can sometimes be easy to isolate, depending on how they're tuned. And don't be afraid to venture outside of the drum enhancement comfort zone-sometimes the wrong Gate threshold settings, driving the wrong sound, can produce an effect that's deliciously right.
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You never know where you'll find inspiration. As I was trying not to listen to the background music in my local supermarket, She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals-a song from over 30 years ago!-earwormed its way into my brain. Check it out at https://youtu.be/UtvmTu4zAMg.
