That too punchy snare

You know you can have as much or as little snare in any mic you want with SD, right?

Also, try lowering the snare’s top velocity a few values. Like have it too out at 124/125 instead of 127.

The issue for those drum vsts is that the samples are already pre-processed. That's a compressed, EQ'd snare you're EQ'ing and compressing. And it's been overcooked for your taste would be my own interpretation. If we're looking at it from a mixing perspective, then you're trying to manhandle a recording that you don't like - so there's no right answers. A lot of dudes here would probably just add a sample of a snare they do like.

In terms of problem solving: you could use a fast attack compressor or a transient designer, but I'd just drop the velocity values on the snare itself and maybe consider a different snare choice altogether - it's a really short decay. You would probably like it tuned lower or maybe with the snare wires looser.

Parallel compression will not help tame the transient - anything but, actually and a fast attack one will just bring up the body and leave the transient untouched.

If we're strictly looking at mixing, I look for "punch" from the snare top, snap or crack or fizz from the bottom, a balanced tone from the overheads, and depending on placement either a realistic picture and/or sustain/decay from room mics. In a real (not sample) recording, a snare doesn't sound like *that* from any particular mic.

I hear what you mean, and if that was my mix I'd start looking at the snare top mic first. I think that's the main place where the punch will live, and if you start EQ a whole bus things would get weird. Some broad stroke cuts around 125 or in the low mids to pull some of the body, maybe. And if that doesn't do it, turn to the overheads (maybe just lowering them a bit or some EQ cuts) or the room / front of kit. Not sure how it was mic'd. The overheads and room gives a lot of the sense of size of the snare, which may also be what is bothering your ear, so adjusting their level and high end EQ with the main snare may help too.

Edit: a lot of this also depends on your approach for tracking. Some people basically spot mic each piece of the kit and treat it as a bunch of separate instruments, even the OHs become "cymbal mics". I like to do more of the OHs and/or a front of kit are "the kit" as one instrument and supplement with close mics for specific instrument voicing.

Agree with Jazz noise.

One thing I discovered is that messing with drum fundamentals have a big impact on the sound, and you can kind of adjust them and play with them using plugin EQ. 100Hz sounds a little different than 110... 90Hz very different than 110, 125 very different than 110 and so on.

Somewhere in that 90-120 range the fundamental hammers the speaker cone like a brick, so by using a narrow Q can search for where exactly it is. Make a mental note, or play with boost and subtract.

Then with another narrow Q, go looking for a similar yet less “heavy” tone underneath. Bring it up a little, while subtracting the fundamental, trading it out.

Keep adjusting and playing with more and more narrow nodes can change the fullness and roundness and punch. 90-120 range is usually where I look for hardness, below 90 for roundness, 150-220 for body and warmth.

Like anything its easy for this to become a bit of a rabbit hole until you figure out how far you can go with it. Check on multiple speakers, etc. YMMV

I rarely do this because it is a rabbit hole lol! But it’s a surgical trick comes in handy when you want. The least amount of work the better. Usually the close snare only.. or snare buss if that doesn’t work.. or whole drum bus if the overheads are also really annoying me. It’s narrow Qs so you can subtract just the fundamental in snare pretty far even on the drum bus without it messing with the other drums. If the whole kit is annoyingly hard, slightly widen up the q a little around 105-125 ish and drop it down should clear it up. Always a balancing act

Gotcha.  If it were 'real' drums and the snare was too much, I'd first try some sidechain compression on the OHs that's keyed off the snare.  A little goes a long way and this can work really well.  I like Cytomic's The Glue for this.  Or FF Pro-C2.  You can do it in the room mics too if you want less snare in those.  

If I wasn't getting what I needed by doing that, I'd use a transient plug (Softube Transient Designer is my fav) and back off some of the snap in the snare track and/or OHs.  Again, a little goes a long way.  

But yeah, that's the amazing thing about SD3, you can decide what drums are in what mics.  And as to the processing comment, I don't think the SD samples have any compression on them.  They sound very raw to me.  

Both. Try an 1176 plug in on the snare(s) channel and a 2500 plugin on the drum bus. Play with the settings a bit and you'll find it!!

Like, that's how it works with real drums . . .not sure how different the experience is with SD and samples.

Not just width on the mics but their actual levels. I mean, if we're talking about mixing you can't pick where the mic was any more. But if you're trying to get some "space" on the snare, yeah, bring the room up some. If you have enough punch, but you need more snare in the kit image, bring up your overheads.  Again, this depends on how the kit was tracked... if your overheads are really more cymbal spot mics, this wont work.

High end EQ, I mean, usually you're not going to get a ton of smack-you-in-the-face off of a room mic. You'll get more of a natural sound with not only the direct hit but also reflections, room verb, decay, everything. The balance of what that a room or front of kit mic gets is different than a 57 pointed at the skin from 6" away, as you might imagine. So if you want to emphasize space on a snare, you can't really do it easily at that 57, but you can boost from say 10k or 12k on the room and suddenly the snare sounds bigger, because big usually means decay, and that will be in the room and in the highs. If you bring those mics down in the mix, the sense of space will go down, but also the balanced sound image. 

If I was trying to bring snap down I'd probably do it in the under snare mic if I had it (don't often use one) or top, starting around 9k. 

Am I correct in thinking in SD3 you can move the mic around and "re-track" your stuff? I've never used it.

If that's what you can do, I'd start with the overheads. Try moving them around until you have a nice balanced image of the whole kit using only those mics. Maybe even a mono overhead, for this track, like 36" over the top of the kick rim. Start with them, till everything is actually sounding pretty nice without any EQ. Then bring the kick and snare in, but now you're not trying to get a full instrument sound out of those two mics any more, just whatever is missing from your overheads. Like on the kick, the down lows and the mallet, and on the snare the punch and energy and really tight snare sizzle. So bring up the snare mic til the punch sounds right, cutting if you need to get rid of annoying donks or whatever. Then bring up the room to fill out space and dimension to your nice balanced image. I guess you can use this same approach if you're only mixing by working on the tracks in this order with this intent. I find this more enjoyable than building the kit out of individual instrument mics. Sorry if this is like way too much info or not what you were asking.

Also, listening to the sample again a lot of the energy of that snare sample is in the length of the decay. I don't know where that's living, but I'd think you can get a lot of mileage just with fader moves on that, adjusting mic balance.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's no compression on any Superior Drummer samples. I know TT compresses samples in EZ Drummer, but they keep SD pretty raw.

Knowing that you're using Avatar makes a difference in this case, though. I find the Avatar drums to be a bit tricky to get what I want out of them. Is it the drum hardware choice? Is it the room (Avatar/Power Station)? Is it the player (Nir Z)? Is it the engineers (Mattias Eklund + someone else, maybe?)? Probably a combination of all four. 

Listen to the drums on John Mayer's Room for Squares album, esp. "No Such Thing," "Why Georgia," and "Neon". You'll hear some very familiar sounding drums, and that album was played by Nir Z. It works great in the context of that album, and Nir Z is a monster drummer, but tonally speaking, it's rarely a sound I'm personally going for.

I remember back when Avatar was the only drum pack I had from TT (10 yrs ago), and it was really difficult to get the snare where I wanted it. If I remember correctly, my biggest success came with using Massey Tape Head liberally on the snare bus (which would've consisted of snare top and bottom). You can also use the envelope tools in SD to clip off the front end of a drum just a bit, and it still sounds natural in the context of the kit. Watch out for the Avatar snares in the OHs: they're hella punchy. As ragan said, you can dial the snare back in the OHs in SD. Once I started exploring other expansion kits, I found SD much easier to do what I wanted.

One of the things I like about the TT approach is that it's meant to capture a particular kit (or set of kits) at a particular moment in time, in a particular studio, played by a particular drummer. All of those things have character to them. It makes for a consistent sound within each expansion pack, but it also somewhat limits the ability to import a drum from a different pack and have it match. Ultimately, if you don't like the snare sound in Avatar, you just don't like the snare sound in Avatar.

Setting aside sample/midi world (or not) transient designer can be great for reducing/increasing punch.

Thanks Ward.

Thnks dogears. I don't have SD3, but I appreciate your explaining it's versatility. I did not low pass the overheads to make them cymbal mics. I like a full kit sound from overheads. I appreciate the EQ tip on the room mics to get the space of the snare.