Isolating drums - toms

[jmh]

One of the tunes I'm mixing may have had the mic move or just carelessly placed. Generally I haven't known how to make a tom track useful other than just manually chop out non-tom regions, on this particular song there is longer sections of alternating tom strikes with kick and snare - which are as loud or louder than the tom itself. The playing is pretty cool so I'm interested in ideas as how I might more feature the toms.

The drummer has been using the floor tom and one smaller one. I've been using an sm81 on the floor tom and depending on the overheads to capture the 2nd tom. On some occasions I may have tried to hit both toms somewhat with the one mic.

A more general question is favored placements for micing a floor tom. As I said earlier, I have somewhat limited experience with drummers and find myself too wrapped up in other questions during recording to do anything other than trying to set up in advance, and hope for the best. Most of the drum recordings have been pretty usable so I'm not doing badly - but I'd like to optimize the various mic usage. Also should I strive for more than trim out in-between parts? (I've seen on videos that several engineers use that approach for toms. It would be handy to be a mixing big-shot, like the chefs on a cooking show, and have an assistant to do that stuff.)

[Bob L]

Consider using Drumagog to re-trigger the toms with tom samples and mixing that in with the original toms or replacing the originals if there is too much leakage.

Bob L

[Cary B. Cornett]

I always close mic all toms, mics maybe an inch from the top of the head, reaching just over the rim. Even with that, I still get leakage, and if I need to emphasize the toms, I do the tight editing of the tom tracks leaving just where the hits are. In your case, a combination of the tight edit and drum replacement might be in order.

[andy cross]

Unless there's an awful lot of spill, the Remove Silence From Track (Or Marked Area) feature in SAW will happily be your assistant in tidying up tom tracks. The gating can be set up to cut slightly before the hit, so you won't lose the initial impact even with a fairly high threshold on the gate.
Do you have some isolated tom hits from other recordings with the same drummer that you could trigger to reinforce what you have? I usually try to get isolated hits of the various bits of kit when recording a drummer just in case any remedial work is required later.

[Dave Labrecque]

The gating can be set up to cut slightly before the hit, so you won't lose the initial impact even with a fairly high threshold on the gate.

Sorry to be dumb, but how do you set such a "negative" attack time for this function?

[andy cross]

Not dumb at all, as it's not obvious how it works, and (I think) not entirely clear from the manual.
You actually set a positive attack time on the gate (slightly counter-intuitive, perhaps), and that moves the point at which SAW automatically slices the region leftwards (ie earlier) in the multitrack. It's essentially the same result as would be achieved by copying the track to another channel, shunting it left by a few milliseconds and using that new channel to trigger the gate for the first one, but quicker.
It's a very useful feature, especially for speech editing. I've managed to break down a single audio file into a few thousand single words (it was a glossary...) with the absolute minimum effort, because being able to offset the gate closing means a relatively high threshold can be set without fear of losing any wanted audio (eg the beginning of words starting with "F" or "S").

[Dave Labrecque]

Not dumb at all, as it's not obvious how it works, and (I think) not entirely clear from the manual.
You actually set a positive attack time on the gate (slightly counter-intuitive, perhaps), and that moves the point at which SAW automatically slices the region leftwards (ie earlier) in the multitrack. It's essentially the same result as would be achieved by copying the track to another channel, shunting it left by a few milliseconds and using that new channel to trigger the gate for the first one, but quicker.
It's a very useful feature, especially for speech editing. I've managed to break down a single audio file into a few thousand single words (it was a glossary...) with the absolute minimum effort, because being able to offset the gate closing means a relatively high threshold can be set without fear of losing any wanted audio (eg the beginning of words starting with "F" or "S").

Thanks for 'splaining, Andy. Looks like this detail is actually missing from the help file. I've long known we could do this, but have never actually done it!

A powerful feature made simple in our digital age. One wonders why such a "negative attack" isn't available with regular gating. Could be very handy in cases where ongoing tweaking of the gate parameters is desired. Although it is achievable by gating from a cloned/slid track, as you outline. Just not as slick.

[jmh]

I tried yet another path, which was to key the gate to the kick trigger track (which was shifted left several ms), filter the key to low frequency and ducked about 25db with 5 ms attack and ~220 release. I marked the key & tom track set the main output to mono and processed mix to soundfile (the kick track was assigned to a muted dummy output track).

I then added the new soundfile to MT and did similar on the snare. I closed without saving and reopened the file. Then added the new soundfile to the mt. I didn't realize but some of the snare hits came through I had 2ms attack and I guess the drummer chose to hit the snare further away for the intro - and I did not slide the snare track left, which would have solved the issue. Anyway I wound up with readily identifiable snare hits because of the sharp spike and a few cymbal hits which I am now removing by hand.

I can't say I have saved any time - but this method could work if I had to do it again - particularly if it was a real long song. I had also tried marking the tracks and exporting tracks with MT processing - but that didn't seem to process the sidechain so I wasted a while on a couple of false starts. I was also thinking of doing something like eqing the kick & snare (unlistenably) and sending them to a return and using that to key a levelizer on an output track but thought it would be more difficult - in retrospect, this would probably be better as you could listen to the end result before you wrote it to a file - and for that matter, listen to it sitting in the mix. I'm not sure if that is doable - but if not, there are other ways to accomplish similar things.

I also realized I have pretty good room mic tracks and can push these up during the alternating hit sections. I will probably use a combo as a testimony to my effort.

[Dave Labrecque]

I tried yet another path, which was to key the gate to the kick trigger track (which was shifted left several ms), filter the key to low frequency and ducked about 25db with 5 ms attack and ~220 release. I marked the key & tom track set the main output to mono and processed mix to soundfile (the kick track was assigned to a muted dummy output track).

I then added the new soundfile to MT and did similar on the snare. I closed without saving and reopened the file. Then added the new soundfile to the mt. I didn't realize but some of the snare hits came through I had 2ms attack and I guess the drummer chose to hit the snare further away for the intro - and I did not slide the snare track left, which would have solved the issue. Anyway I wound up with readily identifiable snare hits because of the sharp spike and a few cymbal hits which I am now removing by hand.

I can't say I have saved any time - but this method could work if I had to do it again - particularly if it was a real long song. I had also tried marking the tracks and exporting tracks with MT processing - but that didn't seem to process the sidechain so I wasted a while on a couple of false starts. I was also thinking of doing something like eqing the kick & snare (unlistenably) and sending them to a return and using that to key a levelizer on an output track but thought it would be more difficult - in retrospect, this would probably be better as you could listen to the end result before you wrote it to a file - and for that matter, listen to it sitting in the mix. I'm not sure if that is doable - but if not, there are other ways to accomplish similar things.

I also realized I have pretty good room mic tracks and can push these up during the alternating hit sections. I will probably use a combo as a testimony to my effort.

Well, you sure sound like you know what you're doing.

Happy mixing!

[jmh]

Well, you sure sound like you know what you're doing.

Happy mixing!

Well, that remains to be seen - I haven't tried mixing in my recovered track back yet. But it's always interesting to explore new terrain...