i cant mix toms.im goin nuts trying to find the right freq.

[burnyourflags]

this is a really old song,im 32 i wrote it when i was 15.i keep thinking my toms are ok but, when i pre-master,and go to smaller speakers,there all over the place.this recording stuffs driving me nuts.now when i listen to anything recorded by pros or anyone,i hear crap i thinks off or too loud,thanks too this forum at least someone can tell me what i dont hear.im not worried about structure on this one.do the toms sound messed up or is it me and are there any sug.on how to mix toms like freq.or levels.

[awaken1]

I'm not really hearing a lot of toms in this, mostly snare kick and cymbals.. What little toms i do hear sound kinda flat and lacking tone..Did you have some muffling on them? if so, kind of hard to get tone that wasn't there to begin with..at 3:14 during the double kick poly going on, they definately need to come up in the mix..can hear the floor tom at the end fill but not the other two toms prior..

[String7th]

I have been recording for a while and for me, toms are really one of the hardest to mic and mix.

I agree with Awaken1, the tom activity was light and I mistook it for a bad snare it a couple times. It was too quick and too flat. Are these samples or mic'd drums? the kick and snare kinda sounded dry and repetative.

It sounds like it was compressed to much so that only the attack came through and none of the resonance. I would suggest shortening the release time so that the rest of the hit rings out. Also for next time, If you aren't geting loud enough resonance or ring during tracking, angle the micless of an angle and more facing the head. The trade off is less snap, but may be brought back up using eq and slower compression attack time.

[burnyourflags]

Originally Posted by String7th

I have been recording for a while and for me, toms are really one of the hardest to mic and mix.

I agree with Awaken1, the tom activity was light and I mistook it for a bad snare it a couple times. It was too quick and too flat. Are these samples or mic'd drums? the kick and snare kinda sounded dry and repetative.

It sounds like it was compressed to much so that only the attack came through and none of the resonance. I would suggest shortening the release time so that the rest of the hit rings out. Also for next time, If you aren't geting loud enough resonance or ring during tracking, angle the micless of an angle and more facing the head. The trade off is less snap, but may be brought back up using eq and slower compression attack time.

ive been getting a lot of the same stuff about the kick and snare being rep.can someone clarify as to exactly what that meens .like are they supposed to sound dif.in each change?im confused on that,they are sampled,so would that make it easier to manipulate the the res.and im using pretty make shift stuff to record this,but,im slowly upgrading the next on mt list is moniters,any sug.on that would be great like what kind and size.thnx guys

[burnyourflags]

Originally Posted by awaken1

I'm not really hearing a lot of toms in this, mostly snare kick and cymbals.. What little toms i do hear sound kinda flat and lacking tone..Did you have some muffling on them? if so, kind of hard to get tone that wasn't there to begin with..at 3:14 during the double kick poly going on, they definately need to come up in the mix..can hear the floor tom at the end fill but not the other two toms prior..

o.k. yea im not going crazy then.thnx man.i do this to much .studio ear!!!!!

[fHumble fHingaz]

ive been getting a lot of the same stuff about the kick and snare being rep.can someone clarify as to exactly what that meens

When a real drummer hits a drum, each time he hits the sound varies, not only in volume, but in lots of other ways too. The human ear is able to detect this variation very keenly. When drum machines first came out, they just used a single sample a drum hit for each drum, so when you put your beat in, the only variation was the volume that each beat played back at, depending on the midi velocity that registered on input.

The problem with this is that when you have a repeated series of hits at similar velocities, as in a fast drum roll, you get a very recognizable "machine gun" effect that sounds nothing like a real drum roll. This goes too for the repeated kick & snare hits through the song - the ear registers pretty quickly that we are hearing the same sound repeated over & over.

Most modern virtual drum instruments are fairly heavily multi-sampled, meaning they don't just play a single recorded instance of the drum at different volumes depending on the midi velocity - They actually use a "pool" of samples for each drum - Some of the more advanced ones have 256 different samples recorded for each different type of hit, & some drum types (eg. snare) might have 3 or 4 different types of hit per drum. As you can imagine, this adds up to a lot of samples per drum (eg. 4 x 256=1024) - so depending on the midi velocity that is input, the virtual instrument selects a different actual recording of the drum hit & a high degree of realism is restored to a virtual performance. A lot of these instruments have "round-robin" programming architecture, which means that for each velocity value, there are 2 different samples for the program to choose from - so even if you input the same velocity value, the program will not repeat playback of the same sample.

I think perhaps the reason you are getting a lot of these type of comments is that you're using either single samples for your drums or you're not varying the velocity of your hits & the program is repeating the same sample. If your budget is limited, I suspect the first case may be true.

[mrlindeman]

Toms can be very difficult in programming. the panning can be one of the worst issues. Getting tone and depth so they fit into the mix is something that comes from you though. Get your ears in there and take some quick notes on what you hear and dont hear. Use eq and leveling to get the things you want to hear in the audible range and kinda go from there. Are they to quiet and if you turn them up does boomy sounds take over and things like that.