Fixing snare volume in a stereo mix

[marcouad]

I have an old mix of a song, the individual stems have long gone, where the snare is annoyingly loud to the extent that it spoils the song (I don’t know how that happened - poor monitoring I guess). I want to fix it best I can - which tools should I be looking at in the UA box of tricks?

Thanks

 

[flandybob]

Not sure about UA but the isotope music rebalance could be helpful. You would separate the drums from the rest of the song, then try to fix the snare from the drum stem only

 

[Neotrope]

+1 on Izotope rebalance, and if you have the means,Izotope RX10 lets you lasso the offending stuff

 

[David MacNeill]

I would try some surgical EQ first, something parametric. I have done that on stereo drum tracks twhere the snare was too quiet and it worked for me. Don't know if it would work the other way.

 

[David MacNeill]

Or you could call Peter Jackson at WETA and have him separate it out for ya. I have him on speed dial for this kind of stuff. His rates are a bit high though.

 

[LesBrown]

Yeah, my first instinct is to try a thin band of compression via Fabfilter MB or some other multiband compressor. I use RX, so that would be next, and probably much better. Izotope Rebalance sounds interesting, but I haven't used it. Maybe I'll give it a try "in my free time."

 

[rodd]

I think rebalance is going to give you "all" the drums, not the individual drums... a multiband compressor or transient shaper (or both) might do it though

 

[mrufino1]

If you have an isolated snare hit anywhere in the track, then fuse audio labs drum ssx would help you. If music rebalance isolates the drums enough, then you could use ssx on that.

 

[flandybob]

Just saw this on gearspace: https://gearspace.com/board/new-pro...remuse-kit-state-art-drum-separation-app.html

 

[UA_User]

I would try M/S processing first. Leave the edges alone, but trigger a limiter on the snare in the center channel.

Since the processing that fixes the snare will affect other things, you may need to automate the snare processing to happen on the snare hits, but back off in between.

EDIT: and tune a side-chain to trigger reduction of just that frequency range, preferably using a linear phase EQ. That way, the bass parts of the mix below the snare are left alone which helps a ton.

 

[chrisso]

Just saw this on gearspace: https://gearspace.com/board/new-pro...remuse-kit-state-art-drum-separation-app.html

Yeah, but so far it's mired in controversy and recently some comments that it has stopped working properly.
I would personally go with something like Izotope.

 

[JamesNorth]

This is absolutely possible with one of the AI tools and then some kind of drum group separation tool - my process would be either iZotope of one of the freely available or online AI stem separation things to get it down to just drums, then use something like UVI's Drum Replacer to detect snare hits and replace them with a quieter sample or lower the volume of the hits. I think Sound Radix have a tool that can adjust the levels of different elements of a drum group as well?

 

[chrisharbin]

I would try some surgical EQ first, something parametric. I have done that on stereo drum tracks twhere the snare was too quiet and it worked for me. Don't know if it would work the other way.

I like this idea the best. It's a PITA to go through and either automate per hit or if your daw has clip gain options, but I think in the end it will be the best way. Not a fan of compression here because it'll squish other things as well likely.

 

[Marshall K]

As always, Steinberg's SpectraLayers will fix this easily. With SpectraLayers you can unmix the song into different (instrument) layers and then you can unmix the resulting drum layer into separate layers for kick, snare and cymbals. Then you can focus on the snare and select/adjust individual hits or lower the volume for the whole snare layer.
You can even use VST3 plugins should you want to, to EQ, compress or add reverb for individual selected hits (or the whole layer).
You'll get astonishingly good results, I'd say better than with Isotope RX10.

 

[Eric Dahlberg]

If you have an isolated snare hit anywhere in the track, then fuse audio labs drum ssx would help you. If music rebalance isolates the drums enough, then you could use ssx on that.

If snare can be isolated, reverse the phase and mix it in to reduce the snare in the mix.

 

[marcouad]

Thanks so much all. Great suggestions