I needed a track to practice getting a better snare sound on, and it's best if it's one I haven't heard for a while, so I picked Forgetting from What Would We Have Done With Eternity Anyway? and have been noodling around with it over the last day or so.
Problem was, whilst I was dealing with the snare, all sorts of other things annoyed me and so I thought I'd better fix them too whilst the hood was up.
To wit:
- Minor drum reprogramming - specifically putting a more even volume driven rhythm on the kick, redoing a couple of snare fills and turning down a cymbal or two
- Changes to the snare sample (obviously) but minor changes to other drums in the VSTi - kick in particular - same samples but different implementation parameters - and lots of changes at the mix level to EQ, compression etc.
- New reverb bus for drums - was using small amounts of a very big room before... now using an impulse for a "snare room"
- Re-EQing the bass
- Re-editing (via volume envelopes) the lead and backing vocals to reduce sibilance and fricatives, reducing reverb a touch
- Removing the autotune setting on ReaTune on the BVs - I had no idea I've ever used it but I did, apparently, and it sucks
- Different mastering limiter
Anyway, it sounds different - question is whether it sounds better - the snare in particular - or have I just wasted a day? It is raining relentlessly, so I have to do something.
I'll put the original up and then the remix so you can compare if you like. Long-ish song... sorry, it just happened to be what I fished out. Didn't realised it at the time.
Original version - October 2018
New version
Incidentally, one of the main "tricks" I used with the snare was courtesy of Kenny G and his vid on splitting transients using Reaper's inbuilt Transient Controller - so you essentially get the snare split over two tracks and can control the attack and sustain parts of it separately. Very interesting...