Why dont snares sound like snares anymore?

Like others have said, because everyone is using the same samples and we are obsessed with no bleed and over compressed and filtered sounds. I fought it for year but due to an unfinished basement and wee lil' kids, I converted my Tama kit to hybrid with triggers and lemon cymbals and pump it through EZ drummer or SD3. It's awesome to play on for sound and feel BUT it does sound like everyone else. So much that if I ever use it for any type of produced music, I would probably layer the snare and cymbals with my own cymbals. What is lacking in the market today (and which would likely not sell much) is a huge library of raw unprocessed and imperfect samples for drums. This would include room mics. If they want to deal with the phase issues that is a bonus but if you start with a raw sample and are in charge of shaping it as you want (or shaping it LESS), we'd breathe more life back into things again.

SD3 oe EZD need a sample pack called "Raw Rock" or "Raw Metal" etc etc...

You can open the mixer in SD3 and remove everything from the drums, giving you just the raw drum sounds. I've had to do it a few times when I couldn't get their EQ to do what I wanted. That said, I'm blown away by how well that onboard mixer works. The only thing I end up doing to the drums after I write the MIDI is a couple parallel compression busses and two additional reverb busses; I'll do one parallel comp of just kick and snare, another parallel comp with the whole kit, a room reverb and then a separate reverb for just the snare.

But until people start learning how to dial those velocities in, it's still going to sound like a robot, just a robot playing unprocessed drums.
 
You can open the mixer in SD3 and remove everything from the drums, giving you just the raw drum sounds. I've had to do it a few times when I couldn't get their EQ to do what I wanted. That said, I'm blown away by how well that onboard mixer works. The only thing I end up doing to the drums after I write the MIDI is a couple parallel compression busses and two additional reverb busses; I'll do one parallel comp of just kick and snare, another parallel comp with the whole kit, a room reverb and then a separate reverb for just the snare.

But until people start learning how to dial those velocities in, it's still going to sound like a robot, just a robot playing unprocessed drums.

good point. I have been sitting there even playing the drums to midi myself and triggers and sensitivity settings only get you so far. Maybe a better drum brain would do it but if you are replacing it anyway why bother? I would absolutely go in and mess with the snare velocities on more intricate parts to bring out more subtle ghost notes. The triggers do an ok job but sort of do what the hats do, maybe 3-4 diff velocities over all. Ultimately though, not snapping or aligning to the grid and actually playing the drums give it more human of a feeling than the "humanize" button does.

I am going to play with SD3 and check out that option.
 
Does anyone care to post their favorite snare sounds in modern metal? Or least? Feel free

A few off the top of my head, and some of these are going back 20 years.....define "modern" 😂











I just moved into an apartment from my house and my new studio is completely untreated, everything sounds like shit in here right now but I know those tunes in particular have had some of my favorite snare sounds. Like I said in my first post though, they're like guitar tones for me and if they work for the song itself, I tend to love it, even if I don't actually enjoy how it sounds on it's own, or even in comparison to the rest of the kit.
 
a nice deep crack to it....


I love snowy in this clip..just kills it ..sounds good because it is a live snare with on board everything from mixer which sometimes is better than running an instrument through all sorts of other shit in a perfect setting.

I played with removing all effects from SD3 last night. Def. what I was after. Still the drum tuning is damn near perfect and the environment is ideal so they still sound almost too good but at least you can have the raw sample with ring if you want. The problem for me still is the cymbals. Not a lot you can do to have access to the raw cymbal sounds.
 
This is all why I haven’t got into much for metal since the 90’s. Anything after the 90’s I like that’s metal is usually Scandinavian stuff where they want retro on the sound. A great example of sweet, natural cracking snare for metal is Anthrax in the 80’s. Love the drum sounds in general that a Charlie got back then. Never too overly processed even though there’s nothing wrong with that. Gary Moore’s Run For Cover album has a great snare sound. Chuck Biscuits got a great snare tone on Danzig 4. Deen Castronovo got a pretty monstrous drum sound on Geezer’s Plastic Planet album.
 


Personally i like the 80's reverb snares, but this kind of sound is apparently "outdated" and judging by the competence of current producers and mixers, they wouldn't be able to pull it off anyway.
 
Don't forget you also have a lot of shit snares and toms from the 80's as well.... any Dokken snare for example. There were a ton of misses and overly gated sounds back then too unfortunately. But overall it was definitely better
 
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