i'm making a bit of dubstep and i'm getting the familiar noises better and better, just having trouble getting my snare hits to really SNAP! like in heavy dubstep tunes. Anyone got any tips?

reverb then heavily compress, then gate to suit..... eqing the reverb's range is important.. also lots of layers can help, depending on the sound - offset the start times of the differnt layers to make it thicker and chunkier

When you say layers, do you mean resampling multiple snare hits on top of each other? B/c that definitely fattens them up. And then cut into the start time of one of the snares? Sounds ill.

I use isolator or equalizer on most of my drums to get the right tone. Try the filter/drive efx for a killer crack.

Yeah, but dont just cut the start time off of some of the hits (well you can do that as well)

If you have multiple attacks just slightly offset from each other, you get this kinda thick crunching effect in the sound,

so like play 3 snare sounds at once, but dont quite hit them at exactly the same time.. pretty hard to do it by ear/manually, much easier to place them in audio editing software.. but u get the idea

wicked! will totally try this out, the drums are so integral it seems no matter what the other sounds are like if the drums aren't right it'll let the whole track down. Nice one!