Heavy compression with medium/fast attack and release settings.
HPF from somewhere between 500Hz and 1kHz to taste and depending on the original tom.
Too bad you couldn't have been there during tracking. Oh well.

You can't be serious, HPF at 500 to 1khz? I've never tried it but that seems really high to me. I usually go lower and almost never higher then 200hz. You might want to mult the toms off and compress them pretty heavily and maybe add some top between 3 and 8khz depending on where the attack is.

Sure I'm serious. Try it before you shoot it down. BTW, keep the overheads somewhat flat... the low will carry thru those, while the close mics provide basically only the "thwack".

Of course, MMV. I don't have the track bassmac is working on. Maybe my suggestion would work, maybe it wouldn't. Who knows?

What about verb - do you ever give the toms something special of their own, or just bus them to your main kit verb, or a little of both?

It really depends. Sometimes I'll have the one short/one long verb thing going on already, and just have to select how much of each track I want in each verb. Sometimes the track calls for no verb at all.

Originally posted by Ang1970:
[QB]Sure I'm serious. Try it before you shoot it down. BTW, keep the overheads somewhat flat... the low will carry thru those, while the close mics provide basically only the "thwack".
QB]

It never hurts to try, but I'd say, unless you have a really good sounding room, well placed decent overhead mics and a really usable sound already on the o/h tracks, do just the oppossite: keep the toms flat (or scoop out some low-middle) and use that HPF on the overheads. There is little you can do if the tom track itself has no punch to it. Yeah, you can try compression, but in general, I haven't had a great deal of success with compressing toms more than a little bit. The decay starts getting wierd, and the compression freaks out if you have any flams on the toms. There is a cool little compressor from SPL called a transient designer that might save your hiney. But it means spending more money, and possibly not getting the results you are after. Sadly, the drum itself (and heads) and the mic and mic placement are very key in a thwacky tom sound. I realize you didn't want us to say these things at this stage.

CS