Ive been engineering and producing records for over 13 years (aka: making money for services) and this is the 1st snare re-amp i have ever seen. That sounded amazing. Props to you thinking outside the box and coming up with a solid solution rather then pull the sample/trigger card. I hate to use samples myself because your drum sound shapes the character for the entire recording, it's the 1st shot at putting your stamp on it. To all my fellow engineers, stop chasing what your hearing from your mentors but commit and create your own sounds. Think outside the box! Cheers... Good job brother, really impressed with this video..
I do this all the time on acoustic and electronic drum tracks. Love the sound particularly of a fender twin's spring reverb on a snare. If you're feeling adventurous you can run the whole mix through an amp or maybe an old boom box and blend it in parallel to your master. Cool to see there's others using the same technique. Great content - have a great time recording and creating!
This really impressed me. I don't usually subscribe to RU-vid channels even if I enjoy the videos, but this proved to me that you are a real sound engineer so now I have. Keep it up.
This is probably the best trick i have seen drum wise. Is this your idea or did you pick it up from somewhere? Your videos are grear, very educational, keep going!
Thanks for the complement! While it's not a very common technique, I'm not the first to do it. I had to do a lot of experimentation on how to get the best results, and using a microphone on top is a result of my own experiments.
Hi, nice to see someone else use this technique. I used to get big kick sound using same "speaker reamping" with a 50 litre plastic bucket. Not kidding. It's all about the resonance.
I've been thinking about this for a while and I think you might be able to use an exciter transducer instead of a typical speaker. In this setup you would put the exciter directly in contact with the head. It will control the ring of the head, but you could add a reverb tail if you want more head ring. The other thing with using an exciter is that you can play around with placement on the head whether you put the exciter in the center or more off center where drummers normally hit the snare. You can pick up a Dayton Audio exciter for about $15 bucks at Parts Express or DigiKey. I think the transducing will give you a much more aggressive attack than inducing a buzz through an external speaker. I'm gonna buy some of these real soon. So I'll report back at some point if/when I do this at my studio.
Niice! I've heard about this technique a long time ago when samples and triggers did not exist But I never saw it actually. It was about the snare drum in Fine Young Canibals " She drives me crazy". David Z, the engineer, said " I pumped the processed snare and blended through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end". That's an awesome idea!
I really like your lo fi approach its very similar to what I'm doing at the minute - using what you have in a creative way to get a distinctive sound rather than rely too heavily on the standardisation of recording techniques that seems over dominant today.
I first read about this in Tape Op about 15 years ago or so, and have been using it on and of ever since. In my case I was just looking for more of the "snare" sounds since the drum had plenty of pop but no rattle. I just took a Yamaha floor monitor that was laying around and plopped it right on top and then mic'd up the bottom .I was so excited that it worked I darn near peed myself. I like tour tweaks and will have to give it a shot. Finally a use for that old Crate 12" speaker.....
+Manofmanytallets Yes, a little. You can adjust for this and the amount will be depending on your system. If your unsure, you can always play a hi hat track through the snare reamp rig, and see how much of a scoot back it'll take to make it right.
6 years ago I attended to a masterclass with Roy Cicala (Record Plant) where he taught us this technique. In that moment I thought "is this really happening?" :) Unfortunately he passed away a couple years ago. Btw, you're providing one of the best content on the internet. Seriously, congrats.
Creative Sound Lab hello could you please tell us how do you wire that speaker is it going directly through a di box via your daw or is it much more complicated than that. Btw your show is awesome. Thanks for sharing precious knowledge.
This is saving my life! I’m not being dramatic- the hours of frustration and tweaking to try to salvage the drum session are now going to be cut way down, allowing me to actually live! Ha! My dumb ass recorded a band live and the drummer had the snares off or something whack so the bottom mic just picked up garbage, and we’re all in the same room wearing earplugs so I saw the meter moving on the channel and thought- we good! No! We were not anywhere close to good! Now with this method- I can have a real, proper snare instead of whatever I managed to fake with a stack of plugins and crap. Also room snare without the swishy cymbals from the untreated room and guitar amp bleed! (now scrounging for wood scraps) Thanks!!!!!!! This is life changing, well, for me anyway on this specific project.
Once again you have shown me something that I needed to see! I just did a session the other day and there was some major hi hat bleed on the snare track (I blame it on poor drumming technique, but that's a different discussion altogether). I will be giving this a try! I'm so glad I stumbled across your channel and can't wait for more content! :)
Very nice! You can also use small active speaker like Avantone mixcube or genelec 8081 if you are out of guitar speaker. Those monitors are heavy enough to stay on the top and center of the snare without anything to hold them to stay in place.
I actually learned that trick in the early/mid 80s when working as a tape-op, the resident engineer often used it on rythmbox snares to make them sound a bit more realistic...
Contrasting The Void Great advice from your teacher !! In my experience recording and mixing is mainly about listening, i mean really using your ears. People can tell you to do this and that, use this compressor and set your EQ like this and its going to sound great, but if you dont use your ears to tweak it for yourself it will probably sound like crap. Great video BTW !!
No worries. I love this stuff too. Good on you for doing it. Your space looks good, your got a pro approach and I am sure it will be successful. All the best with it! .
This is an awesome idea. I'm going to give it a try. It's got my mind turning over some ideas about an arduino controlled motor drum whacker(prob won't work) To accomplish something like this. Great video though
Very cool! I wish I knew this trick. Had a session that the snare was totally trash. Went and Re recorded the drums. Although it was worth it. I would’ve tried this first. Thank you!
And one step further would be to use this system when your track has a drummachine. What would happen if the drummachine triggers a live kit, a live snaredrum andvthe room. That one is on my list. Really cool video and loved the results. Kinda 4 times better then the toinky snare.
Great video btw You say you using an old speaker with an amplifier ? Are you keeping your settings on the amplifier at unity gain ? Another question is are you going from your Daw out to the speaker and recording through microphones and back into your daw ?
Hi Ryan. Great video. I've got good results playing the snare track out of a guitar amp combo on it's back with the snare drum batter down on the amp case. Your way is better though as the snare isn't meant to be played upside down! What speaker and amplifier are you using?
So i just found your channel an boy am i happy. Im stuck trying to figure how to make an acoustic Electronic drum kit hybrid. Id love to run the idea by you an hopefully you can point ne in the right direction.
There's a really cool video on contact mics by the RU-vid channel HoboRec you should check out. He does a electronic drum kit with it about half way through the video.
I don't have enough inputs to add a snare bottom mic while recording for my band, this could be a very good trick to add punch attack and precision to my snare after recording ! But what kind of speaker do we have to use for this ?
Is it safe to connect 4 Ohm speaker to mic input? Microphone (like SM57) have 600 Ohm load, while speaker only 4; so is there any impendance problems like short-circuit of mic input? Thank you.
gordontubbs yeah, I could see how it resembles that. No guitar on mine though, it's just a piano that I strummed with a sustain pedal holding a d minor chord I think.
would this work for taking a beefy snare and making it sharp and ringy, for a third wave ska piccolo snare kind of sound? it seems like the lesser amount of initial high frequencies and sharp transient might make it harder to get a good sharp sound.
This technique works better for going the other way...a snare that has no body and poor snare fullness from the bottom and giving it more. It would be hard to add more ring.
+SoundBoss5150 Not yet, but I think it would be mostly for recording some extra sustain. At some level, you'd be recording the speaker with a bass drum in between. The snare works, because the snares vibrate so easily and the drum responds so well (in volume) relative to the volume of the speaker.
+creativesoundlab What about exciting something else with a kick signal. To provide a bit of beater slap. Am trying to think what piece of percussion or object you could use for this though...
Hey dude, great vid as usual. Would using something cleaner than an amp be better. Can you perhaps come directly out of your desk or would it not give you the volume youd want ? Cheers!
Well the desk gives you line level, which is great for the input of a amp. I think I used a rack mount amp for this video, which is clean and used for monitoring passive monitors. The speaker is full range, but it's heavy on the mids.
Cheers Ryan, I seen you inspired a guy try reamp a kick drum also. Definitely worth trying. Anyways love the channel and think your content is the best online for those who actually wanna get good recordings over messing about with plug ins trying to fix shit :)
+panti christ It seems most of this is to excite the snares which weren't micced up originally, they are on the other side of the drum... With a kick, you can easily get back the low end various ways, so i'm guess the mic doesn't pick up the beater head instead, which wouldn't really be achieved with this. Maybe split up the track into different EQ bands and try different comrpession, or straight reamping.. I dunno, maybe you can exicite another piece of percussion that would successfully replicate a beater head? Or just hit another kick track and quantise it back into the kick sound? (the speaker thing is partly to get the track in time easily, you could do it with snare but it takes ages..)
A small tip, even though this is an old video: Make the snare drum track into a midi track. Get a midi controlled drum module (Hardware) For example polyend.com/perc-drumming-machine/ Pick the snaredrum you like, hook it and mic it up and rerecord it. But man, you did a great job here, thumbs up.
