How to Get a Floor Tom that Doesn't Suck - Tuning, Recording and Mixing
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Inspired by a friends question, I decided to do a deep dive in issues that might be causing your floor tom to sound terrible.
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You’re the man dude. You’re one of the only RUclips engineers that approach this stuff from a creative standpoint yet you are still giving actually useful technical information. Very easy to internalize and use in actual practice!
This video is absolutely fantastic, not only in terms of content but also the cinematography! Those over the shoulder shots on the screen make me feel like I’m in a room with you. And amazing colors, too! Cheers from Germany ✌️
Additionally... I wish you and your family a very merry Christmas and happy New Year... and I’m always wanting you to get all you want and need out of all the work you put in... because I haven’t kept you in my list of channels all these years for nothing. You’re one of the best out there at imparting useful fun knowledge for people who also Love Music and want to learn to record things as well as they can.
Chuk
Hey Ryan, great advice to work with. As always in the world of recording, each person needs to determine what works and what doesn't. But understanding more about it and being aware of potential issues, means that you'll be well suited to get better results. I really like how you begin to tie everything up from the OHs. That's a great technique. Polarity is really important and I love it that you really stress that a lot. Cheers!
I've been away from your videos for a bit, but man was this a great one. You have a killer sounding drum room. I think You're the only other person I've seen using the bx_console Focusrite ISA console channel strip plugin! Great tips here.
I fully respect the text overlay you put on the screen when the floor tom without the sustainer Auralex pads on the bottom actually sounded better. Sometimes we don't need to max out sustain just to take it away. I have a George Way kit and I tried the Little Booty Shakers on the floor tom feet, but frankly the sustain is more balanced without them.
@Baker Jensen could I ask what is wrong with you ?=)
Dude thanks for making this video. Perfect timing as i'm struggling with the floor toms on an EP i'm working on. I never checked the phasing after high passing and lo and behold there lay my problem! Thanks so much man x
the whiteboard shot was really good! I'd actually appreciete If you covered the other toms too :D
awesome video as always. excited for more!
The phase check tutorial was especially useful, cheers man ❤
Nice video! - Floor tom is the weakest spot in my drum sound, looking forwards to trying these tips!
Definitely love the whiteboard shot. I’ve been meaning to try my beyerdynamic m420 in some different ways besides as a snare mic. Thanks for the ideas!
Thanks!
Ice hockey pucks work really well for floor toms, as do books if you're in a pinch at a studio - most places will have books. Great stuff Ryan!
Not sure if you color-graded and/or Altered the lighting in the shots of this video differently than in other videos of yours, but I’m really enjoying the warmer colors in this video-I enjoy the other videos as well lol, this just caught my attention! You have fantastic content man, thank you for all of your efforts!!
Thanks Tanner! Yeah all my videos get color graded and it’s a matter of finding what works. Since you said something, I’ll grab some stills to use as a reference. I have a lot of the settings saved in the camera and then it’s a matter of minor adjustments later on. I film w two Blackmagic pocket 4k cameras and I think this video was the first one that used Blackmagic raw. They enabled luts for the raw in the camera and it’s made a big workflow improvement. So this video is basically rendered out from the raw files, instead of from a graded video clip created earlier in the process.
@@creativesoundlab awesome. I personally shoot with the Panasonic GH5, and love the micro 4/3’s system! Blackmagic makes some great stuff; thank you for sharing this info man!
For tuning, I like to have my tom and bottom heads tuned to the same note. I find that the tunebot is very helpful with this. And don't be afraid to use moon gels or good ol Big Fat Snare on it. Great tool.
Truth. When I get good floor tom sounds it's usually "by accident", I mean it's mostly due to the acoustics of the room and figuring out where the drumkit sounds best that has made the biggest difference (to me). Thanks for this very educational video!
Thanks Ryan, I've learnt so much to improve my hoime studio and the way I use it from you...and loads about getting drums right too. The explanation on checking phase was really useful and the invisible white board is really cool. Great idea to be live in the chat after a video too. Cheers
They Gun Dog, thanks so much. Very nice comment and good feedback.
Great video dude!
Killer video. And killer bass amp just chillin in the background too, would love to see a video on bass recording using that a nice character amp like that. That Audix D4 sounds really nice, and it is hypercardiod, so easier to position and better rejection of the ride than maybe an MD241. Makes me wonder if the MD421 sounds good on toms, and bass cab. I wonder if the Audix D4 sounds good on floor toms, maybe it could sound good on bass too. Also wonder if the RE20 sounds good on floor tom, since it's also quite a nice bass cab mic, and useful on kick sometimes too.
Fantastic tutorial as always.
Nice video content! The Floor tom is usually disregarded, so this is really great. :)
Wow, very interesting and helpful stuff!!
Thanks Dino
Happy floor toms….yes! Great content, helpful and enjoyable as always!
Awesome video Ryan! I'm a big advocate for xy or blumlein overheads since it makes the work of getting things in phase so much easier. Need to get one of those R88s though...
My bandmate and i were having trouble with finding the right tuning for the drum set we had. We broke the set down and added each piece, one at a time starting with the kick, tuning it until it fit with itself and the room. Then add the next one doing the same but with the rest of the set.
If i ever got a drumset again i think i would just get a kick and snare and focused on them until they were great. Then add things i actually felt i was missing. I dig this video a lot 🙂✌️
That’s a great tip. Drums are always a product of the room and the thought to o that was spot on.
Great video as allways! Super helpful 🙌🙏♥️
Best videos of time !
Amazing video. Thanks for sharing!!!
Whiteboard shot was awesome!
I use virtual drums for my own projects but recently got a kit. I'm aiming to record drums do these tips are appreciated.
Nice!
I enjoy this kind of thing the most. Recording drums is a most fascinating subject to me, although I pretty much haven’t recorded actual acoustic drums since the 80s. Ha ha! I had one mic that I recorded everything with. A Shure PE56D. Vocals acoustic guitar and drums... all with this mic only. Oh well.., I had a lot of fun!
Oh! I still Like this mic... and have a few even now. But I do use condensers too now! Lol
Also... I was happy to see the return of the glass wall of glowing instructions of drums n things! Ha ha!
Never have me name stuff! 😳🤪
You’re the best,
Chuk
That's the overhead placement technique from the book "Mixing with your Mind."
You should try the book mixing with impact too it is really great.
great video as always
Acoustic Control Corp amps and cabs are massively underrated. Warm, gritty sound that works awesome on bass, keys, and some electric guitar sounds. They are also pretty affordable.
As always you made recoding interesting😍🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
I can already give a thumb up as I know it will feature quality content.
Thank you so much man!
Nice video. I'd love a video about mixing drum overheads. Never really processed them much as I never knew what I really wanted from them (especially with compression).
Loved this! Thanks man :)
If you have too much sustain my go to trick is putting a pillow underneath. It doesnt need to touch the reso and does the trick the best imho
Bad ass man thank you so much this really helped me out
Thanks Reyes!
That sounds awesome dude.
Love to hear your opinion on some of the sE electronics mics. Like the
V7x and sE8. I'm finding the V7X to be amazing on toms especially with
its off axis rejection.
How do you feel about bottom mics for toms? Also, a cool plugin to check out regarding phase is the Voxengo Correlometer. It's free and it'll visualise the phase relationship across the frequency spectrum between the left and right signal when you insert it on a stereo track, so you could put it on a bus and pan your overhead to the left, and your tom to the right, and see the phase relationship.
Hey There,
I am really enjoying your videos. Do you have any video on your EQing technique? I like how you talk about the different harmonics and their relationship while EQing. And your drums sounds are pretty sick my friend. Thank you!
Incredible
Sleishman drums in Australia sell spring-loaded floor tom feet, for increased resonance. Worth a look for people looking for other solutions there
Hey man cool video , thanks! How would you record just a floor tom part just by itself ? I have a evre20 and several condensers , a 57 and a 58. Any help appreciated . The rest of the drum parts are already recorded .
AWESOME
Did you learn to write backwards to do the glass demos aha? Love it, another great video
I think he reversed the footage. It was doing my head in haha
I left a clue...if you look at the beginning where I show the glass, you can see it’s different. I do a horizontal flip or mirror image. At the intro this wasn’t done
Floor tom sounds great but you gotta have a super light touch on the cymbals with that setup. I've got blumlein fathead ribbons 6' in front of kick, really want to try them from behind throne looking down but don't have beefy enough stand yet... Do have some PA speaker tripods and wire ties, but wife is teleconferencing for work so I'll just blurt stuff out on the internet.
Sounds weird but whenever I can't get a good sound out of toms, especially when a floor tom wont cut through, I've found that taking about 3-6 squares of toilet paper, fold them up into a little rectangle, then use a tiny strip of gaff tape to stick it onto the top head, as close to the edge as I can get it. For whatever reason it keeps the resonance of the drum, but deadens it just enough to where it cuts through the mix better. Works everytime 🤷♂️🤷♂️
I never had an issue tuning individual components, even with my Ludwig classic maple from the 70s which definitely doesn't have a perfect bearing edge, but tuning the three toms to sound really good both individually and as a set of three has always been a pain. Usually, I find the 16" floor to be the cause of my suffering, it just won't play along with others.
Yeah it’s funny how one drum doesn’t want to play well with the others. I often have a hard time w a super small Tom and snare. Or just getting them spaced out enough in pitch.
There's also the Little Booty Shakers for floor toms.
Ah yeah those are nice!
Do you ever time delay your spots a few samples so that they line up with the overheads? I find that this dramatically affects the low-end punch of each drum.
Never do this you can never align all mic's so this mostly just fucks more up than it fixes just use polarity flips instead to try and get the sound.
The problem is you can only align one thing, you can align the snare but the rest will be more out of phase.
Yeah, I’ve been doing that more. I use the overheads as my reference and move everything to it.
I time delay some stuff. It works great. Usually the kick is the one I time align the most i find.
@@BoboButYouCanCallMeTom I'm in pro tools so I usually find the delay between the snare and the overheads, and then use the time adjuster plugin set to the same amount of samples for all the spots. All the spots are delayed the same amount this way.
You've got the white (black) board game on!!! Fun fact, I own 2 16" Vistalite floors and each one has it's own sweet spot where one wants to be tuned lower than the other!!
Is there an alternative to Auralex Platfeet? Seems like they're no longer made and sold
I've seen people show the same thing using pieces of felt. I think they were using cymbal felts
Rubber floor tiles like the ones used at gyms could work pretty nicely.
10:40 10:50 So what you're saying is it's an ongoing thing.
As a drummer, I find 12" and 13" rack toms much harder to tune. Especially 13"
I lost my sketch pad
Its really big I dont know how I lost it
...also, I think it's time for some new clothes:). This video popped up and I thought, it must be something from a few years ago I missed. At least a radically different color for the headband for 2021 videos!
Haha yeah. Evergreen content. But I’ve been wanting something newer.
@@creativesoundlab Consistency is good man don't listen to him haha