Saturation is a great effect to use alongside EQ to fill out the sound of a lot of instruments in your mix. Today I’m going to focus on how we can use snare saturation to do just that or even add some transient grit to your snare.
How to Use Snare Saturation
There are a lot of different saturation plugins you can use to enhance your snare.
You can use a multiband saturator like FabFilter’s Saturn:
It can emulate a number of different distortion sources (with warm tube shown above) but the different bands and individual tone controls allow you to impart some warmth in those mids to thicken and fill out a top heavy or otherwise thin snare.
You can alternatively focus on the top end to add some transients to your snare if you’ve got a lot of body but the transient crack of the stick on skin isn’t well enough represented. Favor those high end tone sliders to keep the low-mid and mid fundamental frequencies of the snare untouched but instead add a little sizzle in the high frequency transient range.
Saturation for Adding Body to a Thin Snare
When I’ve got a thin or otherwise weak sounding snare in one of my own mixes or via the stems I’m sent to mix, I reach for what is still the best saturation plugin in Soundtoys’ Decapitator.
I have a preset I’ve simply labeled “Snare Round” as it always fills out those low-mids and mids via subtle harmonic distortion to give me that round snare sound you always hear in pro mixes:
I’ve rounded off everything below 50Hz and everything above around 12k via the onboard high and low pass filters, respectively.
Independent of these, I’m slightly favoring a warmer sound by turning the “Tone” dial roughly 15% to the darker end of the spectrum. I’ve talked about how much use I get out of that tone dial in the past, sometimes keeping everything else neutral or near neutral to have minimum saturation from Decapitator itself but simply using this dial to inch the overall vibe of a track warmer or brighter.
I have the Decapitator Style button set to “T” which emulates Termionic Culture Vulture’s “Triode” setting and, combined with the rest of the settings creates some very pleasing fatness on the snare.
Even when my snare isn’t especially lacking in body, I like to blend in a bit of this preset, albeit with a lower Wet/Dry percentage.
Even with the “Drive” set to “3”, it’s pretty subtle and you’re not hearing any of the crunch we normally associate with distortion; these settings are perfect for enhancing your snare with transparent subtlety.
Saturation for Adding Punch to a Bland Snare
On the other hand, if you DO need that snare to better assert itself in the mix by way of more of that transient punch, I’ll tick that “Punish” button which adds very palpable crunchy and sharp distortion.
This feature really is for absolutely crushing and punishing your audio, and when the Wet/Dry and Drive dials are way up, you can create some interesting aesthetic effects.
That’s not what we’re looking for in this case here unless we’re going to blend it in via some parallel processing in which case we’d just keep the send/blend amount relatively low because that Mix percentage is 100% wet (as is always the case with an Aux/Return track).
If we’re using this effect as an insert (see inserts vs sends) then we’d keep the Mix percentage relatively low especially with “Punish” set to on and the “Drive” set high to give our snare a taste of that top end bite.
The high end, high gain distortion brings a sense of white noise to that natural 5k transient “crack” region of the snare, so just a taste of that blended in via a 10% Wet/Dry setting will help our snare better assert itself in the mix when, drawing the listener’s ear to it.
Just make sure if you’re following the high end favoring, biting saturation with a compressor, you keep that attack at or above 1ms so the transient crack we’ve constructed isn’t getting swallowed up or otherwise yanked down by that compression.
Those are the two major ways I like to use snare saturation, but NOTE that these two problems and fixes aren’t mutually exclusive – you can have a snare which is BOTH bland yet still lacking in body.
You can use both of these setups on two different instances of the plugin, one after the other. I’ve done this before to in equal measures fatten up AND liven up my snare, so keep that in mind as something to try to enhance your snare across the board.
Speaking of which, check out my complete guide to mixing a snare for more tips on getting your snare sounding its best with a number of types of processing.
