Hi guys, how's it going? Mixing some tracks for my mates band at the moment and ran into a small problem.
Basically didn't have enough inputs to the desk to individually mic up each tom (settling for kick, snare, and 2 overheads). Now I can easily find the EQ of each individual tom to bring them out on the overhead tracks, but then that particular frequency will be too loud for the whole song.
Now what I'm trying to do is basically gate the overhead track so that it is only open when a sound of that particular frequency is playing. Virtually create a track for each tom, if you will.
Already figured out sidechaining a kick drum into a tone generator with a gate to give a bass drum a bit more of a boost on the low end, so I imagine it's something similar to that, but almost in reverse. Using Pro Tools 8 as well btw.
That sounds really finicky to me. For a start each tom will have a huge bunch of overlapping frequencies or common frequencies between them so it'd be hard to differentiate between them.
It's also hard because gates work by detecting volumes, not by detecting frequencies. You would be better off trying to EQ the overheads as a whole - if you can't then maybe you need to think about your miccing technique.
The only thing I can really think of is to take a duplicate track of your overheads, increase the gain on the frequency you want (which should be the fundamental frequency of the toms) and hard cut every single other frequency on the track. Then do a simple gate on that track so the track only activates on the loudest hits of that frequency, which should theoretically be the toms.
Make sure there's a lot of release on it so the toms don't cut off before they're finished.
After that, you should have a simple track that you can sidechain into your overheads so that they only activate on the sound of that set of toms playing. Give it a shot - but is it worth it? not really
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.