Today's Guest Post comes from returning contributor, sound designer & blogger Kristian West. Check out his work over at Wavepusher.
There’s something about “your snare is shit” that haunts us. I hear epic snares in a lot of music that’s not my own, while often struggling to get my own snare right to match a certain mood in track_22BpartBESTidea_final_fixthesnare.als - you may recognise the struggle.
Of course you could be sample swapping into oblivion and eventually find a snare sample that just needs a minor EQ tweak to work. But there are other ways to go about things, getting your hands dirty at the same time. Having actual fun.
So Many Snares, So Little Time
Snares are probably the one sample type we gather the most of in our folders, maybe only rivalled by kick drums. But this WILL happen sooner or later: No matter how hard you look, that certain sound, that killer hit, is just not there.
That’s where using what snares you have with a convolution reverb such as the one in Airspace comes into the picture. On the box it says reverb/delay combo, but really what you get with Mode Audio’s very own plugin, is access to a range of high quality impulse responses, which you can blend into your source, two at a time, with pretty customizable controls (read my full take on Airspace in my review).
What’s really great about Airspace used like this is the way you can alter the pitch, attack, length and decay of each convolution source, to have the snare match the key of the track, for instance. Or to add some hiss or spike.
Also, you can affect each of the two IRs by lowering and boosting the IR gain level inside each section of the plugin, often with surprising results. Just be careful to also edit the actual section output at the top of the plugin, which combines into the plugin output volume at 100% wet, since they add up fast.
Get Dirty
Take any snare, no actually, take a common snare. I’m telling you, it will not leave the effects chain without an attitude if you go about it something like this:
- Load up a drum kit with a snare you would have likely replaced to keep working.
- Load up a convolution reverb. We’ll be using Airspace by Mode Audio, as mentioned, since it’s an excellent, multipurpose tool capable of lifting almost any sample out of its misery.
- Place the plugin directly after your snare, and only the snare. In Ableton Live, for instance, drag Airspace to the actual cell of the snare sample.
- The trick is to leave the middle part of the plugin alone, the delay section. We don’t need it, since we’re creating a single snare hit. If we need anything roomy, we’ll add space to it using the Space part on the right hand side of the UI.
- Using Airspace to blend in two impulse responses we drastically alter the source snare. Maybe it’s just a DMX blip initially, but if you add the reverb and color sections from one or more instances of Airspace, you can totally alter the nature of the source snare and take it from bland to grand.
Airspace is pretty awesome for drum design because you can modify two impulse responses at once in each instance of the plugin. Colour is the leftmost section of the plugin, the impulse responses here can set the character of the sound, whilst the IRs in Space are there to shape what perceived space the sound is playing in.
At least that’s one way of working with the plugin. Play with the mix knob for Colour and Space, as well as the overall mix og the plugin. Three sound sources are creating your new sample now.a
Beat It
In the video below you can see and hear an unfinished track loop of mine, currently consisting of two parts/scenes, two scenes, and for each I’ve put in a drum kit with stock sounds from the Ableton library. Listen as several instances of Airspace affect each snare hit to create a totally new snare from recognizable and stale stock material. Yes it takes time, but feels good getting one right.
What’s so great about Airspace is, that even though you can now beat the living daylight out of your snares, you’ll also have a plugin capable of working on a broader level of lifting a melody, percussion, someone’s better singing voice than mine into the air and just letting the whole thing take off in a wonderful combination of spaces, delays, echoes, textures. And just a tiny hint of DMX snare to smile about when hearing your sound defined.
Grab the free trial of Airspace, good for 15 days of use, right here.
