The snare is loud, oh my gosh!

[subindex]

Compression is something that still evokes the famous phrase "In the quiet words of the Virgin Queen Mary... come again?" in my mind.

I've been reading alot on it lately but can't seem to really get the hang of it.
It's the process of lowering the peaks beyond a threshold by a certain amount of ratio, but I don't get how this makes beats "fatter" still.

lol

[native]

hipass, overdrive, limit, and cut away space from other sounds for it.

This is definatly the way.

I tend to cut frequencies i dont need and layer snares up to fill in the gaps. after that i put all the snares (usually around 2 or 3) into a snare channel and then bus that into a drums channel. Then limit.

[hugh]

in my opinion if you can't get the kick sounding right with simple equalisation then you are handling your mix down wrong or are simply dealing with the wrong kind of sounds in the first place.

[bowzer]

layer a few different snares ontop of each other. sometimes i use 3 different ones, panning 2 of em to the left and right alittle with some reverb, and keep the "main" one centered with no effects. then eq depending if needed

[james fox]

you could always try clipping the snare, normalise it in a wave editor, amplify it as much as you can before it sounds distorted, then sample it out.

then replace the snare with the clipped version, it will almost always sound louder with more body at a lower volume.

I would still point out that altho this can be used as a replacement to compression, compression is a vital tool to learn how to use.

Also a lot of peeps will say this does bad things to the waveform, and it does but unless you intend to listen to your tune to be heard at home on an amazing hifi then it doesnt really matter that much IMO

i like this technique. works well if you use a bounced down version of all your drumz to if you need some more umph on your drumz in general. soemtimes even layering the clipped version with the original dynamic version will lend great results.

http://www.gvst.co.uk/gclip.htm

this is good for that

[legend4ry]

Even though I am probably one of the less-technical producers posting in this thread, what I tend to do with my snares is if they're to loud, lower peaks if its still to loud, subtle reverb and slight chorus tends to take a lot of the sounds what come close to deafening you.

Although this probably isn't good advice, it works for me