Part 15 of 31 – If you’re still looking to fatten up your snare drum and our EQ treatment alone isn’t cutting it, there’s another great tool at your disposal. It’s called a compressor. Jackpot!
Squash The Peaks
So to fatten up this snare, we’re actually going to squash the peaks a little bit. Why? Well by turning down only the peaks, we can turn up the whole snare, which in effect turns up the tone and the tail of the drum. And to our ears that sounds like fat awesomeness!
Do Not Create Another Song Until You Read This Guide
(Price: $17 Free Today)
Discover the 6 Steps for Creating a Radio-Worthy Song From Scratch
My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Say I am using Recorder Man technique as my overheads, they are obviously going to pick up the snare as well. Do you recommend still soloing the snare to dial in eq and compression or to only dial them in with overheads active? I understand for video-sake that you solo the snare track, but in real life would you keep your overheads up in the mix so that you would eq and compress with the end sound in mind? I guess all the other drum mics will get snare bleed as well…
Yes, you totally want to check what this newly processed snare track sounds like with the OHs. It all contributes to the overall snare sound in your mix.
Copied from youtube:
Hi, there’s something I don’t get here: let’s say the transient region is 3dB louder than the tail sound. The compressor release is set to around 0.5 seconds. So, the compressor level reduction shouldn’t be get back to non compressed level until 0.5s elapses, but the snare sound is surely shorter than that. So, how can this be working the way you explained it? When the transient comes, the compressor takes 0.5s to recover, so the snare tail is reduced too. Am I missing something?
The snare tail shouldn’t be reduced if the threshold is set above it. Even with the compressor “engaged” it wouldn’t be turning down the tail at all.
Not sure about this Graham: let’s say a snare transient causes the compressor go to 6dB reduction. The compressor will revert completely to 0dB reduction (with a curve that depends on the compressor make) only after the release time has finished. This is how I know a compressor works.
In your video the release time is half a second, so the snare tail will definitely be affected by some degree of level reduction, again depending on what shape the release curve has, but it will be affected.
You’ll definitely want to play with the release time to fit the source material. Try it for yourself 🙂