Make Huge 80's Snare Drum

The 80's of the 20th century brought a lot of new and exciting moments in the music scene. It was the age of ridiculous excess, from loud metal guitar riffs to drum sounds. This was especially true for drums. You've probably heard it before a snare erupts with an exhalation-like reverb before abruptly cutting off. This is known as gated reverb, and it was widely used in pop and dance music in the 1980s. Everything sounded larger and better right away. Recently, the sound of the 1980s has resurfaced in the shape of a music genre known as Synth Wave. And those renowned-sounding drums can be heard in many contemporary tracks. The following tutorial will show you how to make a huge '80s snare drum with simple tricks.

Further, in our Soundbridge: DAW, we have prepared a short sequence containing essential elements like kick drum, snare drum, hi-hats, and bassline. Let us hear how it sounds unprocessed.

Since the kick and snare drum will be our main interest, we will start by listening to the snare drum solo.

The first thing to do would be to choose a reverb and place it on the snare drum channel effect rack. For this purpose, we have chosen the ValhallaRoom by ValhallaDSP as our reverb effect. In addition, we want our drum to sound very large, so to do this, we will dial a pretty long decay time, a fair amount of pre-delay, and a mix parameter set to 50 %. Let us hear how that sounds.

Snare Drum Processed with Reverb

Moreover, the next step would be to place a compressor after the reverb effect to control the dynamics of our drum and for better control of the reverb tail. As an effect of choice, we will use SoundBridge's native compressor effect.

Last, and maybe the most important effect in our chain, would be the gate effect. Moreover, the gating effect helps us to make that signature 80s-sounding snare drum by sharply ending the reverb tail. Again, we have chosen the Noise Gate effect from the Soundbridge native plugins collection.

Furthermore, we will use the same process chain for our kick drum and toms but with slightly different reverb, compressor, and gate effect parameters. Finally, let us hear our sequence sounds unprocessed and then with drums processed in the 80s style.

If you liked this article, here are some more on snare drums:

• Tune Your Snare Drum to a Track
• How to Make a Layered Snare Drum
• Use White Noise to Enrich Your Snare Drum
• Make an 80's Style Snare Drum with a Gated Reverb Trick
• Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix