No matter which DAW you work in, a simple compressor is all you need to take your snare drum from OK, to fat. By using a fast attack setting and tweaking the threshold and makeup gain just the right way you can bring out the tone or beef of your snare to match that initial transient, giving you a fatter, fuller snare drum sound. This video will show you this simple and subtle step.
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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. 
Awesome video Graham! It’s strange but even if I knew the meaning of the “Attack” parameter I didn’t realized yet how to get that full round sound on the snare, that’s great, no expensive plugin, no weird editing, just a stock compressor and the right settings! Thank you!
Great video, Graham! I like how you pointed out the transient portion of the snare hit in relation to the tail.
I remember one of the things that made learning how to use compression more difficult for me were more abstract terms like “fatness” in relation to the snare. I’d watch tutorials where mixers would say something vague like “now we’re going to slap on a compressor to get a little more fatness out of the snare,” and then give some cursory information about their attack and release settings without going into detail.
One of my big revelatory moments in mixing was when I first used the selection tool in Pro Tools to identify that transient portion of the snare hit, setting my attack and release time accordingly, and then printing the sound again with the compressor on to see how that waveform differed graphically.
I swear I must be tone deaf. I’m trying to listen to the difference, but just can’t. I see the meters, visuals, and graphical representations of the settings, but when I close my eyes and just use my ears I get lost. I’m using decent headphones also, not some computer speakers.
It’s pretty subtle in this example.
Can you do this on toms as well?
Sure thing!
This tip was awesome and I will be looking closer at how I compress the snare from now on.