A Quick and Easy Way to "Embiggen" Your Drums

Musicians and producers probably all have a handful of tricks they tend to use a lot in their songs. One of mine is that when I'm looking to make a chorus pop out and sort of up the "oomph" level, I like to add a special type of sound behind my snare.

Start out with a mono sample of a more electronic-sounding clap or snare. Load up your reverb of choice and add a nice-sounding room reverb. When you're setting your wet/dry level, go a little wetter than you usually would - this isn't your main sound, it's to suppliment the main sound. Now bounce this sound down with the effects on it and import it into your sampler of choice. Copy the sample so that it is on two different layers. Pan one of those layers hard right, and one of them hard left and detune ONE of the layers by a semi-tone or two.

Now, no matter what your 'real' snare is doing, just play the roomy clap sound on the backbeats (the two and the four). Set the level of this track so it is sitting 'behind' the main snare and isn't on the same level or louder. The result you're looking for is that the snare drum suddenly gains a little width, depth, and texture that wasn't there before. I like to do this on choruses mainly in order to boost the energy and the 'power' and lift it out of the verse sections. It can take awhile to find the source sound you think works the best, but as a good starting point, give a try to the easily-sampled reverbed 808 clap sound in the breakdown of Yaz's "Situation".