?It turns out that the way the drummer hit his drums could have caused a major audio engineering catastrophe if I wasn't able to doctor it up. To those of you who skipped page one of this article, I was dealing with drum tracks where the drummer did a great job of balancing his kit, except for the kick drum. It turns out that the kick drum microphone has A TON of snare in it because he hit his snare hard but was very soft on the kick.

Luckily, the kick drum is one of the “easier” tracks to doctor in a recording. Some tracks are much more difficult to deal with without causing bigger sound quality problems.

In this case, a light foot made his snare drum sound absolutely terrible. It wasn't my recording. It wasn't my mic placement either. It was just the fact that the sound being emitted into the kick drum had relatively too much snare. You see, if he would have hit his kick drum 10db harder, my mic preamp on the kick drum would have been turned down 10dB. I would have never needed the gate and the tone would have been there from the beginning.

I must admit that a snare being too loud is seldom a problem. In fact, usually the snare is not loud enough. Imagine if a drummer just barely tapped on his snare drum in relation to the entire kit! Where would we end up? Well, imagine all the stuff that would be getting in that snare drum microphone if the snare drum were played 10dB softer. Actually, forget about that a second. Imagine the overheads. How would the overheads sound with a weak snare drum? Well, they would be missing some snare drum, for one!! More importantly, the overall sound of the drums would not be what we were looking for. When the overall sound of the drums is wrong, there is no engineering tricks to salvage it without sacrificing fidelity.

Sure we've got a snare top track. Let's just crank it up. That will make the snare louder! Yes, it will be louder, but so will everything else in that drum track. The off axis bleed from the toms, cymbals, and hihat is going to be loud in a snare track that wasn't hit very hard (unless everything else was hit equally soft ....and that never happens!!)

I could always gate the snare drum a little bit, but then you get into unnatural opening and closing of the snare drum track. Without the proper gate with a very well setup triggering of some kind, it's very tough to make the snare drum sound like the sound we have in our head. If the snare track needs to be cranked that loudly, you will hear audio artifacts and you will probably not like it!!

Worst of all, when a snare drum is hit softly it usually doesn't sound good. You need to hit a drum hard to get it to properly cut through a mix. So no matter how much gating, eq'ing, or any other stupid audio engineering trick we use, the tone will never be there.

The moral of the story is the key to a great drum sound is in the drummer's hands!