Free Snare Sounds from our Sound Lab Experiments!
Sometimes we have a little free time and just want to test out some drum sounds with a minimalist mic setup. It’s more for hearing how different snare tunings reveal themselves under the microscope of the mics.
These aren’t as polished as our drum samples that we offer for purchase, but thought they would be useful for many of you nonetheless. So, have a listen and, if you think these snare sounds might work for your music in any way, download away. Free samples – no strings attached!
DOWNLOAD THESE SNARE SAMPLES!
Recording Info and Details
These samples were recorded using a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum, with a medium-tight tuning. As you can tell from the video, some slight muffling was used (the little yellow gel stars on the drum head – just as effective and MUCH cheaper than Moon Gel or Drum Dots!) with only four mics. Of course, there’s a Shure SM57 on the snare, but what can’t be seen are the Shure SM81condenser overheads about four feet above the snare and a Cascade Microphones Vin-Jet ribbon microphone about 10 feet away in a wide-open space outside of the studio office.
For tuning we often use the Tune Bot Drum Tuner to record tuning values. Generally, we don’t use it to get the snare sound we are after – that is the product of turning the drum keys until the drum opens up in the way we want or when there’s a resonance and tone that sounds pleasing/interesting to our ears. Once we do lock in a snare sound that we like, we’ll then record it. Something we learned from this, however… always write the value down. You think you’ll remember it, but you won’t! So, the tuning values for this particular snare are lost forever but it would seem it was likely in the 270-290 Hz range. Just a guess, though. But, that is usually a tuning range that sounds nice for this particular snare.
If you’re still reading, you’re obviously a gear geek. So, thanks for staying with it as we rambled on about the particular recording details on this snare.
In any event, download the snare samples and see if they prove useful for you and your music. If you create any music with these sounds, share it with us – it’s always great to hear how the samples actually sit in an actual piece of music!