So I've gotten my act together and gotten a bit more up to speed at 'mastering', and while it still doesn't sound as polished and shiny as a pro would do it, I have gotten it loud and thick and even and all that fuckingness.

Also I managed to get the snare up to desired volume. I ended up just dumping out the cymbal bleed by lo passing at 6khz. The snare sounds super midrangey but I'm okay with that, it is now punching out without a bunch of brash nasty cymbal noise.

Album art has been coloured, just waiting on the guitarist to pop our logo and text on there. We about to be done this shizz.

Question, sir: I have no listening devices hooked up at the moment. Have you ever tried doing something retarded with the snare to bring some top end back in after removing hat/cymbal bleed/hash/extraneous garbage? Like the Andy Wallace trick of using a sample just as a 'verb send? I know hi-fi is not how you roll for your metals, but there are still tricks out there. White noise generator (hey, it worked for AC/DC and no one would ever accuse Back In Black of sounding at all fake). Parallel processing, EQing 'verbs, etc.

I like loud snares myself, really high in the mix, and the hats- even with my good drummer peeps- are a bastard of a thing. Randy and Jim both raise their hats way up and whale on the snare. It is what it is, I'm afear'd, sometimes. I lurves to parallel smash the snare, gated and EQd to Hades and back and bring that up underneath just for sheer volume.

I've heard of folks using a de-esser on the close snare track to get rid of hats, but I've only tampered with that briefly. I guess it would definitely bugger up the top end of the snare, but I only use the close track for impact anyhow meself; if you're getting a good crack! in the OHs/room and you don't have to edit the fuck out of it I suppose that could be a viable solution.

Another interesting one I've tried: if you have a "trash" mic for the room, set it up so it gets lotsa lotsa snare. And then wreck it even more. All really depends on what you want the snare to be doing.

But I digress.

I did try the de esser but alas, my particular hi hat bleed was such that doing so compromised the snare too much.

Those all sounds like some great tricks to try out. The white noise especially sounds neat to me. The Vesication album is a done deal though, I have told my bandmates 'okay, here is the final master!' a few times too many, so I'll leave it at that. It is pretty loud now, just lacking some hi end. I kind of like it, sounds really in line with my 'mid-fi' metal.

In the future I'll be making efforts to avoid this whole thing by A) employing baffles between the hat and snare mic and B) never ever micing the snare solely with a 57 ever again.