Lofi snare drum enhancment 1
Lofi is a free Pro tools stock plugin, meaning that it comes stock with all versions of pro tools. Many people often think that the stock plugins are not very good and often to go 3rd party plugins to help when mixing or enhancing sounds.
Today I opened up a old session that I had recorded a few years back and listened to the drums. The first thing I noticed was the lack of bottom snare mic in the recordings. (the bottom metal chain of the snare drum is actually called the snare its where you get that high end and that snare sustain and top end sound). After a few minutes of messing with eqs and compressors and saturation plugins I remembered that I had Lofi, Now Lofi might not sound the best on a mix or enhance things the most dynamically but it has some very important and key functions as well as many many ways you can saturate or distort a sound.
My Personal favorite thing to use lofi for is for enhancing top end on sounds that need that white noise kind of sound. If you bring the noise up in lofi you get this white noise the more you bring it up the louder it is and after much listening I noticed it sounded just like a bottom snare when brought in just enough. The distortion helped add some overall compression and harmonics to the signal to help it sound more exciting while the noise added the sound of a bottom snares actual snare part. using it as a insert or in serial on the channel meant I’m changing the whole sound so the goal was not to make it sound like a bottom snare but a blend more like two mics in one channel.
The key to using something like Lofi as a insert is to keep in mind that adding to much and making it sound like all snare bottom will also give you a lack of snare top so you have to bring it in subtly enough to not destory the core sound but just enough to enhance the attack and give the high end excitement to the sound with the noise knob. All while using the distortion section to add compression and thus extending the decay of the sound then using the Saturation knob to help tame out some of the excess harsh top end overtones you get. watch the video above for a actual example of how this all works.
