How do mix toms ?

[LeSedna]

Hi

There is a lot of things that I'm trying to improve in my mixes, but there is one that I absolutely don't understand. How the hell do you get that "smack" in the toms ? I love in most pure metal cases when toms are really hearable and don't hide as a muffled round "bowwwm" behind the guitars. A good example would be this : even if a little less "smack" and more round could be a good alternative.

For the kick, we usually boost the highs to get the clic besides the lows, but on toms I don't know how to put it in front of the sound, in order to get the "smack" added to the round note of the tom.

First, do all of the kick/snare/tom really raise the volume at every hit ? Because to get the smack I always need them to be quite powerful and raising the gain of the tom would make my master hit the -3dB quite often in a mix. That seems odd before the compression/limiting stage.

Maybe it's a general mixing issue ? Listen to this : http://files.getdropbox.com/u/881054/Training/crystallight_moveonfromhere/moveonfromhere1.mp3
This is the mix quickly mastered of what Crystal/Light proposed on another thread (thanks to him).

 

[if6was9]

Boost the click on the toms, gate them so that this high boost doesn' make shit of your cymbals. high pass the rack toms, you can go pretty high with, you decide whther or not to high pass the floor tom- depends on the band and the tom tuning for me.

I don't like to compress the toms usually by themselves, however I do include lot of toms in my kit( minus overheads) parallel compression. lets them sound natural but have that smack thats needed for deadliness!
If you're really struggling you can try clipping them with something like Gclip to get them up a bit.

It's also important to leave room in the guitars and especially bass for the toms to poke through, same as you'd do to a snare and kick. EQ out where their click lies in the guitar and watch you're tom shine through.

 

[ahjteam]

my toms from the mixing with freeware plugins thread you started:

http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/bigtoms.mp3 (dry, processed, effected)

only gate, eq, comp in the individual channels
and reverb + multiband comp in the bus

in context: http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/freeware_mixproject_snip-03.mp3

http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/freeware_mixproject-03.png

 

[roy22341]

http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/production-tips/432955-eq-compression-toms.html
http://benvesco.com/tonemonster/mixing/2008/mix-recipes-tom-eq-and-compression/

I found these pretty helpful.

 

[LeSedna]

roy I love the benvesco blog you linked. I'll have to check this.

I'm worrying about one philosophical thing : I've read that the best is to try to avoid boosting frequencies, I often read people achieve to have a good guitar sound just with a subtle eq. But there, I read in the link "boost 8dB" etc. So, is that statement only applying to guitars or bass or vox (best to remove f more than boosting them) ?

 

[egan.]

roy I love the benvesco blog you linked. I'll have to check this.

I'm worrying about one philosophical thing : I've read that the best is to try to avoid boosting frequencies, I often read people achieve to have a good guitar sound just with a subtle eq. But there, I read in the link "boost 8dB" etc. So, is that statement only applying to guitars or bass or vox (best to remove f more than boosting them) ?

Don't get too caught up in the philosophy of less is more or anything else. If it sounds good do it. That said typically my biggest tom eq thing is an aggressive mid cut. I'll pull a big chunk out at a medium Q and then sweep it until the tom opens up. Then I'll adjust the Q and cut until it sounds right. It's easy to initially feel like you need more highs but once you scoop things out a bit you'll find you need to add a lot less on the high end. At that point you can use your high eq to find a more focused smack as opposed to a general boost.
Of course as with most things if the heads are old or the guy is really limp wristing the fills you'll be hard pressed to pull out an attack w/o some degree of replacement.

 

[Sean in Silence]

http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/production-tips/307384-general-tom-eq-tips.html

 

[DaWolf]

.I only have to mix my own so it`s always similar for me. I start with the highest one until it sounds right. 400hz area is the enemy (on my kit at least) so I start cutting that first.Then I start to match the others in character.
To get them even more consistent I do a multi comp on the tom bus and compress out the mids even more. I only raise the gain back up on the lows and highs.
I have no problems with the attack, some attack will come through the OHs as well.
That is with an almost 20 year old Yamaha Power V and Pinstripes. Never felt the need to replace them totally. But I have sampled them and blend them in, because I don`t have enough decent mics to record them all at once in best quality.

 

[chonchball]

Choosing the right mics for the job are a key too. You can get a great punchy tom sound using Sennheiser MD 421s and utilizing the bass roll off switch on the mic for the toms (more roll off for smaller toms)

they retain a ton of stick smack and still round off the punch and tone of the tom as long as they are tuned right. You can get a better sustain from your toms if you tune the top and bottom head together to create a chord that resonates richly. No tom will sound great in a mix (the way you want it to) if it was recorded poorly. If it sounds open and kind of dead to start with, that's what you have to work with. EQing is not a magical process in which you inject "nice sound". It's just a shaping tool that will accentuate what is there.

new heads are definitely a good idea, remo and evans both make nice single and double ply tom heads for metal. also, gain stage at the board or pre makes a big difference too. gain up higher and you will get more bleed that you'll need to gate, but you'll also get more richness of in the toms

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

Don't forget micplacement too

I remember the day when i was recording drums for my band's album. I was finished setting up and tuning the drums and the engineer was placing the mics.
Mics were all Sennheiser MD421 except for the lower floortom which was an Audio-Technica uuuhr.. something (looked like it was more of a bassdrum mic) and he placed all the mics very very close to the head and i was like "Doesn't that gonna buzz like a son of bitch? It's almost touching the head" and the guy was like "No no , just have a little faith in it" we recorded a little bit after we soundchecked the kit and toms sounded amazing! Very direct but still very open/full sounding. Drumheads were Evans EC2 clears by the way. Verrry naise!

 

[LeSedna]

your advices help me a lot. I'm starting to mix again Kelle666 (from the Yasser Arafats) raw tracks to try this and show you the result

 

[xmortumx]

my toms from the mixing with freeware plugins thread you started:

http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/bigtoms.mp3 (dry, processed, effected)

only gate, eq, comp in the individual channels
and reverb + multiband comp in the bus

in context: http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/freeware_mixproject_snip-03.mp3

http://www.ahjteam.com/upload/freeware_mixproject-03.png

Sounding nice man... and what freeware plugins did u use??

 

[Kellii]

Sorry for Resurrecting an ancient thread, I didn't think it was worth making a new one.

When your making room for toms in a mix what do you tend to cut out from the guitar and bass tracks to get your toms to shine through? I'm finding it hard to get my toms to sound like part of the mix.

I'll try and get a sound sample up soon to show my problem.

 

[droppedrecords]

Stillwell Audio Major Tom.

Of course a gate and an eq first but this comp gives you that click you've been after.

 

[XxSicRokerxX]

Terrible youtube quality.

 

[colonel kurtz]

honestly, i pretty much treat toms the same as the kick.

gate: this is a must, even if you cut out all the trash before/after the hits...don't use it to cut out background noise, but to shape the sustain along with the compressor

eq: high-pass. boost a little above the HP, scoop low mids a little, boost the high end a little. the higher the pitch of the tom, the higher you'll set the filter and the boosts/cuts.

compress: 20-25ms attack, quick-ish release...comp can go before or after eq, whichever works better.

then send all toms to a reverb which is high-passed to cut out the mud. then send all to a parallel buss that's set to crush, and it's good to go...hopefully.

 

[Machinated]

My favourite thing to do recently:

Duplicate the tom tracks, and then strip silence the duplicate so it's just the tom hits and the sustain you want. You'll need to adjust the fade outs for each hit. Then blend with your original mic track. I love having the bleed from the tom mics to make everything sound bigger, but doing this means the tom hits are louder than the bleed AND you can control how much bleed you're letting in. The best way to get toms to 'pop' out is a good hitting drummer and a well tunes tom. Emperors always sound best to me,tuned fairly low.