I had posted in Spectralayers that when I split drums, cowbell and highhat were on the same layer and I wondered if I could split further, as I wasn’t seeming to have any luck. that post went nowhere, so I’m wondering about another approach.
The snare is very loud while the cowbell is so soft I can barely hear it sometimes. If I used extreme compression, might that work to bring the snare down and cowbell up? If so what kind of settings are suggested. This isn’t separation, but if I could hear the notes or see well, I could cut them out and put on a new track.
a practical method would be to double - or “thicken” - the natural cowbell hits by using a closely matched sampled cowbell and sync its hits via an Instrument Track and MIDI notes. You can use audio hit points to determine the beginnings of the natural cowbell’s transients, and after syncing each hit manually (fine grid) you can further shape the resulting cowbell sounds, as needed. Also, you’d have to be careful if you perhaps hear some phase rotation effect or boxiness happening between the natural and sampled cowbell, especially if one of both versions (the recorded one or the sample library one) aren’t dry enough.
Did somebody ring my cowbell?
If I was doing this, I’d try @Johnny_Moneto 's method using a dynamic EQ with a very, very, narrow Q.
If that didn’t do the job, I try @Markus_Leuthel method, with the same dynamic EQ on the original audio, except with a cut, to dampen the cowbell there.
If that still didn’t do the job, I’d use a MIDI drum instrument and simply replace the hats and cowbell. Something like Groove Agent(SE).
In a mix, the subtleties of hats and cowbells will not really be heard.
Cowbells are a bit of joke, these days, but they can come in handy - listen to my Terminator track, for example. (Plug, plug!)
You might also try using a multi-band compressor. Since snares and cowbells primarily live in different frequency ranges you can compress them individually & re-balance them that way.
These are some interesting suggestions. Looking at spectralayers, it looks like the snare is strongest at ~-200, while the cowbell is about 1K. Trying the multiband equalizer, with all the settings down all the way except at 1500 or 1K, in a part that is mainly cowbell there seems a slight difference but anywhere else the snare is still so much louder.
When I use the spectrum analyzer in cubase though I get the same peak at 250 even if I select an area with just cb or with just snare, so I don’t know how that works.
On this old recording, I had some time ago used Spectralayers to separate the items in the drum track, and then make new tracks of the layers. Recently I did use hitpoints and through midi and sampler get a much better bass drum sound. I also did for the snare, but then that procedure turned the cowbell into snare sounds also, and why I wanted to separate them on the original layer where they weren’t separated.
I put that layer back into spectralayers ( this is all within cubase) but couldn’t get a separation. It seems that when I use the frequency tool in a narrow vertical area where the cowbell is strong, shortly after the snare does a fill and sounds just as loud, so maybe their frequencies are overlapping a lot.
What I wonder about, since now Spectralayers opens when I click the snare, I can’t get the normal waveform where you can get hitpoints and I wonder as in my unanswered post, whether Spectralayers can be removed from the scene. I think I may wind up seeing how well I can hear all the parts with cowbell and replaying them on the TD50x pad. I’ll try the multiband compressor idea though first, to follow the extreme EQ.
Between the blue lines is a part that is almost all cowbell, while the peaks outside are the snare. I was listening to the frequencies in the gray select band where both the CB and a snare fill following were both heard well.
Aside from the other suggestions, instead of downwards compression to compress the snare (as your post implies), try upwards compression to tackle the cowbell.
Cableguys Shaperbox 3 and the VolumeShaper Module might help. You could isolate the snare by drawing points round it, and bring the volume down. They do have a Free Trial version, so you could test it out,… if you want to. Just giving an alternative if you can’t do what you need to in Cubase.
This example is using the Reverb Module to isolate the snare. I didn’t see one for the VolumeShaper.
Set the band so it is around the Snare (I think you have it on the cowbell now). Then lower the control circled below to reduce it’s level. I’d probably try disabling the other bands too.
