floor toms near the snare and rattle

N

NotThatBright

New member
I understand the standard positioning for floor toms, when you've got a 16" and an 18", is the 16" to the right of the drummer, and the 18" to the right of the 16". Due to a cramped space I have always had to have my 18" on my left side, next to the the snare. There's maybe a foot and a half or two feet of air between the 18" tom and the snare.

I got all my toms and the snare tuned so that there's no snare rattle, except for the 18" tom. This was a pain in the ass, especially the 12" tom which is right on top of the snare. Yesterday I spent a while tweaking just the 18" floor tom, to no avail. When I'd move it another foot or two away there was no rattle.

Has anyone ever had a big floor tom that close to the snare and been able to eliminate rattle without resorting to making the snare so tight or the tom so dampened that you can barely hear them?
 
Sometimes tuning one slightly different will lessen the issue. But as Greg said there will always be some sympathetic ring. In the mix its not audible.
 
Greg_L said:
Snare's rattle. That's what they do.
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Thank you for that.

JG96 said:
Sometimes tuning one slightly different will lessen the issue. But as Greg said there will always be some sympathetic ring. In the mix its not audible.
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That's cool. I was surprised to get the other toms tuned to the point that there's no rattle, so I figured I'd try to go 4 for 4 if it were possible without going nuts. Definitely not worth any more effort. Thanks.
 
Try setting your floor tom legs on cymbal felts , otherwise just deal with it, or use a noise gate.
 
WHen all is said and done, snare buzz is never an issue for me because of the volume of everything else. Snare buzz is an issue when your snare is backstage, you have a singer-songwriter playing acoustic on stage and the mains are causing your snare to buzz. That's an issue. But in actual playing? Don't even worry about it.
 
Greg_L said:
Hey you're welcome. Now welcome to drums. I wouldn't sacrifice tom tone for some snare buzz, but it's your call.
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YEP.

Too many waste time thinking that isolation of each drum is necessary. Get over that. Don't solo individual drums and think you need to do something. Drums sound good when they are tuned correctly. That still makes the snare buzz sometimes.

In the mix, you will likely enjoy that. It is just what they do.

And don't go and gate each drum because of the buzz. Just sayin.
 
dreib said:
Try setting your floor tom legs on cymbal felts , otherwise just deal with it, or use a noise gate.
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Suspending the floor tom legs with something a little bouncy can really improve the sound of a floor tom too. I never thought of felts but I have put them on chunks of foam in the past.
 
Greg_L said:
Hey you're welcome. Now welcome to drums. I wouldn't sacrifice tom tone for some snare buzz, but it's your call.
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Easy there, cowboy. I'm on your side. Snare buzz is like the sirens' song to me, when I'm in the mood for snare buzz.

dreib said:
Try setting your floor tom legs on cymbal felts
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I'm not sure this will work, but if it does, I gotta say that was a great fucking idea. Or at least something I'm disappointed I didn't think of to try myself.

jimmy said:
Too many waste time thinking that isolation of each drum is necessary. Get over that. Don't solo individual drums and think you need to do something. Drums sound good when they are tuned correctly. That still makes the snare buzz sometimes.

In the mix, you will likely enjoy that. It is just what they do.

And don't go and gate each drum because of the buzz. Just sayin.
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Don't get the wrong idea, the buzz isn't driving me up the wall or anything. I was just wondering if anyone had gotten rid of it when there was a floor tom so close by, or if I was wasting my time trying to tune it to eliminate it. I can certainly live with some buzz. Not a shitload of buzz, though. A shitload of buzz is for the birds! :)

Thanks for the comments, guys.
 
JG96 said:
Suspending the floor tom legs with something a little bouncy can really improve the sound of a floor tom too. I never thought of felts but I have put them on chunks of foam in the past.
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The rubber feet on my tom legs are suspended on little built in springs. Pretty neat idea.
 
Greg_L said:
The rubber feet on my tom legs are suspended on little built in springs. Pretty neat idea.
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Yeah I actually got the idea from my drummers Pro M. I tried to mimic the idea on my friends super cheap kit and got a lot more volume out of the tom by doing so.
 
Greg_L said:
Snare's rattle. That's what they do.
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JG96 said:
Sometimes tuning one slightly different will lessen the issue. But as Greg said there will always be some sympathetic ring. In the mix its not audible.
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I disagree with this. The OP is correct to try and reduce the amount of rattle. It might not be completely audible in the mix but it still registers as a noise you don't want.

Keep tweaking. I actually turned my 5 piece into a 4 piece because one of my toms wouldn't stop rattling. The results are good. For me it boiled down to: OK I use the tom 3 times per song at the cost of 3.5 minutes of rattling? Buh bye.
 
ibleedburgundy said:
I disagree with this. The OP is correct to try and reduce the amount of rattle. It might not be completely audible in the mix but it still registers as a noise you don't want.

Keep tweaking. I actually turned my 5 piece into a 4 piece because one of my toms wouldn't stop rattling. The results are good. For me it boiled down to: OK I use the tom 3 times per song at the cost of 3.5 minutes of rattling? Buh bye.
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I would agree with that if this guy was playing soft, open, dynamic music with a lot of space for snare buzz to seep through. He isn't playing that kind of music though.
 
dreib said:
Try setting your floor tom legs on cymbal felts , otherwise just deal with it, or use a noise gate.
Click to expand...

I gave this a whirl, but no dice. Oh well. If the day comes that I can throw out all the shit in my basement that I'll never use again, I'll have enough room to put the 18" tom where it belongs on the right-hand side and this won't be an issue anymore. Thanks for trying to help out, guys.
 
Take care in "fixing" acoustic drums - you can make them sound weird. Snares rattle. Toms reverberate. If the drums sound good in the room while you're playing, you are in good shape. If you're recording digitally, you can cut out all the tom tracks that aren't playing. I sum mine to a stereo track, and so can just cut out the parts that don't have toms, so I don't have a bunch of 421s and 57s capturing the room and the other drums while there aren't any toms to capture.

If you are playing the 18 in an arrangement where it's solo or close to it, and it sounds bad when you strike it, then that snare rattle is a problem you have to address. If you can punch in the parts, throw off the snare and take them in pieces. I guess this would be an appropriate time to use drumagog or something to trigger a decent snare sample or tom sample, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

Personally, I would just tune both the snare and the 18 to minimize the sympathetic resonance between them. If it was a persistent problem, I would change the arrangement.

---------- Update ----------

Whoops, thread necromancy.
 
supercreep said:
Whoops, thread necromancy.
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That sounds like something the weird kids in high school would be into!

Just as a epilogue to this whole situation... At the time I wrote this I never knew what an 18" was supposed to sound like- I had it tuned too tightly, had a foam dampening ring inside the head, and a bunch of moongels on it. After seeing a picture of it in a thread about a different problem I was having with it, Greg told me I was choking it and to ditch the dampening ring and moongels, take off the heads, and tune it from scratch. Also gave advice on how to tune it properly. When I got it tuned so that it actually sounded like an 18" tom, a welcome side effect of the whole process was there was no longer any sympathetic snare buzz at all. Chalk another one up for the Drum God.
 
nice, you can also drop the tension on the snare at the lugs by the snare beds, usually helps kill sympathetic buzz
 
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