Tom tricks

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A.David.MacKinnon
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Re: Tom tricks

Post by A.David.MacKinnon » Thu Mar 18, 2021 7:37 am

losthighway wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:44 am
Theo_Karon wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:03 am
Since no one has mentioned it yet - a subharmonic synthesizer can really help with this problem too. DBX makes a bunch of good ones that are all pretty cheap, like $100 ish - great to have in the rack for all sorts of things.

The low end it generates is usually way too low (it works in the 25-50 hz range) but you can saturate the result and then high pass it - this way you get the overtones that imply the lower information without flooding out your low end. Sometimes a bit of the synthesized low end can be cool too, but almost never without a high pass to curb the very subbest of the subs. A little goes a long way and lots of monitors don't even reproduce those frequencies so be careful!

I like this method vs pitch shifting etc because that tends to alter the timbre so much that it's a recognizable addition - the sub synth when used well can be invisible.

Also combine with re-amping through a tom if it's still not doing the trick. A useful method is to reamp through a smaller speaker (say a near field studio speaker that rolls off around 50 or 60) so the super sub stuff gets taken care of that way.

Cheers

Theo
Yeah, I like this trick. I did a mix last year where the band wanted to switch gears to something full hip hop, which I've never done. I triggered a very low synth note off the kick and they were very psyched. Surprisingly easy. It's only a trick of going just far enough, but not too far.
That's the way it was done in the days before digital editing made all this easier. The other one was to trigger white noise with the snare. It's amazing how easily you can turn real kit tracks into a drum machine this way.

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