Hey... Me and my brother write and record our own stuff. I write and record everything, he does the mixing and mastering with my assistance. We write heavy rock songs... We've been doing this for years and our progress on the mixing front has been VERY slow, quite simply because we're both lazy. But I now feel we're at a new level, which sounds somewhat professional. That is probably an overstatement but I'm happy with the quality of our mixing now.
We've always used drum samples. We use at the moment drumkit from hell superior. It has taken me about 1 year to find a drum sound that I want and really like. But heres the problem; When we finish mixing and move onto mastering the snare loses its punch, I deliberately looked for a snare that could really cut through the music. Now it seems we're stuck and 2 songs that are complete and mixed are just sitting there waiting to be mastered.
My brother doesn't really know how to get the snare to stay the same in mastering as it is in the mixing process. So any advice on what could be our problem would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers for your time.
-Rick
Comments
Since no one else has responded yet. My first suspicion would be
Since no one else has responded yet. My first suspicion would be that your overall mix is too loud before you apply a limiter or that your snare is too loud and the limiter is attenuating the transient attack of the snare. If you are using a multiband compressor and applying it to the high end this may be the cause of it. At any rate I think it has to do with compression.
You might want to try to fix this in the mix before you master. Really you should have someone else master you project anyway. It's not a simple task and more often than not, when you play with tools like Multiband Compressors, eqing an entire mix, you end up doing more damage than good. Try mixing at a lower volume in general then if you feel you want to bring it up when you "master" you can do that without worrying about squashing it too much.
Someone with a little more experience will probably drop in and correct me hopefully but I thought I'd give you a starting point.