How I mix music _Part #9 Snare Drum/Loudness



Ya know …opinions are like snare drums …almost every modern song has one. I have seen some weird recording techniques of snare drums; they are not the topic here, that’d be “How I Record” which is a whole other series.

Loudness War Explained

When you compress something it makes big small or …it makes small appear big. The snare drum, being an instrument in your mix that most likely has the most transit attack, will trigger a compressors threshold by shear energy alone. If the compressor is a mix buss compressor you may change the whole nature of the mix by over compressing the final stage.


Say your mix engineer placed acoustic guitars into the background of the mix giving the aural presentation a light melodic “floating” in the back of the musical picture. If you over compress the final stage of a mix …let’s say keying the threshold of the compressor off of the greatest energy presenting itself in the mix, while concentrating on the “Loudness Level” of the mix as opposed to its Dynamic Range, you will create what is called a Butter Bar effect. It is when your loudness meter is all filled in with no peaks or valleys showing themselves …basically looking like a bar of butter.


The effect it would have on our supposed background guitars is bringing them forward in the mix. It would turn a nicely placed melodic structure into a “jangly” competitive tone being compressed into a small space with other small jangly tones. This understandably restructures the entire mix picture from its original intent.

An audio engineer from the 1950’s told me …Scotty, turn your monitors down then turn the volume knob up until you hear the first sound, it shouldn’t be the snare drum.

Next up _Overheads

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