How To Mix A Metal Snare Drum w/ Buster Odeholm

Getting a snare drum to punch through a dense metal mix without sounding thin or fake can be a battle. You can spend hours carving with EQs and smashing with compressors, but sometimes it still lacks that special something. What if one of the best tools for shaping your snare wasn’t an EQ at all, but a distortion plugin?

It sounds counterintuitive. We’re usually taught to avoid unwanted distortion. But in a full mix session for Nail The Mix, Vildhjarta’s Buster Odeholm pulls back the curtain on one of his go-to techniques: using multi-band distortion to creatively EQ and add character to drums. Let’s break down how he turns a middy, boxy snare into a weapon.

Diagnosing the Snare: Exaggerate to Annihilate

Before you can fix a problem, you have to hear it clearly. When Buster first solos the snare, he immediately identifies it as being too “middy” – not MIDI, but M-I-D-D-Y. It’s got a build-up in the midrange that’s robbing it of its crack and impact.

His first move isn’t to reach for an EQ. Instead, he inserts a compressor and cranks the hell out of it. Why? This isn’t about dynamic control; it’s about sonic investigation. By squashing the snare, he blows up all the subtle, buried frequencies—the annoying ring, the harshness, and the boxiness. This makes it painfully obvious which frequencies need to be dealt with. It’s a classic move that unravels the sound so you can surgically address the issues.

This aggressive use of compression as a diagnostic tool is a killer way to train your ears and pinpoint problem spots you might otherwise miss.

The Core Trick: Shaping Tone with FabFilter Saturn

Here’s where the magic happens. After identifying that nasty ring sitting somewhere around 800 Hz, Buster does something unexpected. Instead of just EQing, he reaches for FabFilter Saturn 2. He calls this the “Eric Valentine thing,” and it’s a brilliant way to add life and character.

Using Distortion Like an EQ

Buster uses Saturn’s multi-band capabilities to treat it like a surgical tone-shaper. Rather than applying distortion to the whole snare, he isolates just the high-frequency band. He then drives the distortion in that band to accentuate the top end.

You might think this would just make the snare sound fizzy and trashed, but the result is surprisingly subtle and effective. When blended back in, it doesn’t sound overtly distorted. Instead, it adds the perfect amount of aggression and texture, making the snare wires pop and giving the top end a pleasing “sizzle” that an EQ boost alone can’t replicate. It’s adding harmonic complexity, not just volume, to a specific frequency range.

Taming the Unwanted Frequencies

With the top-end character locked in, now it’s time to deal with that midrange problem he diagnosed earlier. He follows the Saturn plugin with a standard EQ and carves out the offending 800 Hz ring he heard so clearly.

His philosophy is smart: you don’t have to eliminate all ring. A bit of high-mid ring can actually help a snare sound realistic and cut through a mix. It’s the low-mid ring that tends to build up, consume valuable space, and make things sound muddy. By selectively applying distortion for character and using targeted EQ cuts for problems, he gets the best of both worlds.

Adding More Character and Control

The signal chain doesn’t stop there. To further refine the snare, Buster adds a tape saturation plugin, the Slate Digital VTM (Virtual Tape Machine). This move serves a few purposes:

• Adds a low-end bump: The tape emulation gives a little weight to the body of the snare.
• Tames harshness: It smooths out some of the aggressive high-end he just added with Saturn, making it sit more naturally.
• Controls the transient: Tape saturation naturally softens the initial hit, keeping the snare punchy but not overly sharp.

He points out a crucial tip for the VTM: don’t forget the settings panel. He often tweaks the Bass Alignment control, which is essential for preventing the tape emulation from adding too much low-end mud, especially when used on a master bus.

Reinforcing the Snare with the Overheads

Here’s another pro-level move from Buster. He’s not a fan of snare bottom mics, finding them difficult to work with. His solution? Use the overheads to bring in that authentic snare sound. As he puts it, the snare sound captured by the overheads is often the closest to what you hear when you’re standing in a room with a real drum kit.

Applying the Saturn Trick (Again)

Using a GGD overhead print (with the bleed removed), he isolates just the snare hit. He then applies the same FabFilter Saturn technique to the overheads. By finding the band where the snare sizzle lives, he can distort it to bring out that “snare wire” texture and life.

Because the overheads are a stereo source, this also adds fantastic width to the snare sound. It becomes wider, more realistic, and more three-dimensional than a close-mic alone could ever be. He even boosts the input gain into Saturn to get the plugin to react more aggressively, dialing in the perfect amount of sizzle.

See The Full Mix In Action

This combination of diagnostic compression, distortion-as-EQ, and overhead reinforcement is a powerful workflow for crafting modern metal snares that are aggressive, textured, and full of life.

These are the kinds of actionable-yet-creative techniques that separate a good mix from a great one. Imagine being a fly on the wall while producers like Buster Odeholm build a mix from the ground up, explaining every plugin choice and automation move. With Nail The Mix, you can. You get the multitracks from bands like Vildhjarta, Humanity’s Last Breath, Gojira, and Periphery and watch the original producer mix the song from scratch.

If you’re tired of presets and ready to learn the real-world techniques that pros use every day, it’s time to unlock your sound. You can see every detail of Buster Odeholm’s “thall” mixing masterclass by checking out his full session on mixing Vildhjarta and Humanity’s Last Breath right here on Nail The Mix.