Seafroggys
Well-known member
So my current project that I'm working on has timpani parts. Now, unless you're rich or have access to record at a school, most people probably don't have a set of timpani to record with. I figured with a bit of ingenuity I could get close. It ain't the real thing, and some tweaking needs to be done in my process, but this is how I did it.
I took a floor tom and removed the bottom head. Probably for best results you should use an orphaned floor tom from craigslist or something, so you don't have to constantly take heads off and retune ones that are on your main drumset. The floor tom I used had an old 2-ply head (Coated Emperor), but for best results you should probably use a relatively fresh 1-ply head, like a Remo Ambassador.
You need to remove the bottom head so you can achieve a single pitch. With two heads this is virtually impossible, and real timpano only have one head anyway. Usually floor toms are tuned pretty damn low, so begin cranking the crap out of your head. Most timpani music sits in the lower bass clef region, around the C3 range. This is high for a floor tom, but it'll be much easier with a one ply head. I managed to get mine around an Ab2, roughly 40 cents flat. You don't have to achieve a perfect intune pitch, but the head has to be perfectly intune with itself. So tap around the edges by the lugs to make sure its uniform pitch.
There's many ways to mic this up. I took a ribbon mic, put it about a meter away from the drum, pointing at the shell, not at the head. This will bring out the resonance. Take your music, and pick a single note. Let's say a D3. Mark all the D3's in your music, or whatever. Create a new track, name it D3 or whatever, hit record. Play only the D3's. When you are done, pick another note in your music, create a new track, and repeat. This is where my bass drum line in marching band experience comes in handy, having to do split notes all the time.
As far as actual playing technique goes: real timpani are played toward the rim, away from the center. This brings out the most resonance. I find that playing on the floor tom, the center was the most resonant. Also, you MUST use mallets. Unfortunately I didn't really have good timpani or drum mallets, all I had were marimba yarn mallets. They did the trick just fine, but I would have preferred to have flufflier timp mallets to use.
Once you have tracked all the parts (or even during tracking) bring out a pitch shifter plug-in. I used Reaper's ReaPitch myself. Since I knew that the drum was tuned roughly to an Ab, I could easily ball park semi-tones, then with the help of a piano, get it more finetuned to the correct pitch. Do the appropriate pitch for each track.
If you don't mind spending more time on this, you could retune the drum for different groups of notes. For example, for the bottom notes, you may want to tune the drum to roughly F2, then for the higher notes, maybe a D3. This might prevent more of the curious artifacts from extreme pitch shifting from showing up.
So we have all our notes. Take a look at the sound. More likely, it'll be tinny as hell. Tight floor toms do not boom. If you've ever played real timpani (like I have for years) you'll notice that there's tons of undertones beneath the fundamental, making the timpani sound really bassy, warm, and huge, despite the fundamentals only being roughly an octave below middle C. We'll need to work on this.
There's probably multiple ways of doing this, but this is my process. In REAPER, I created a Timpani folder (a buss if you will). I used the UAD Pultec EQ plug-in for this. I set either 60 or 100 hz to +6 to +7, and adjusted for taste. This really brings out the warm low end that timpani are famous for. But we're still not quite there. Timpani are really resonant instruments....large hollow metal shells. So we'll need to create some artificial reverb to represent this. This is not room reverb, which I normally reserve for my UAD EMT 140. We're still sound shaping, trying to get the actual instrument as authentic as possible.
I played around with PSP PianoVerb a bit, but then decided to settle on Glaceverb, another freeware plug-in that's great for creating wacky reverbs. You can try different pre-sets, but I ended up going for the Warm Percussion and adjusted for taste. More than likely you'll need to tone down the wet mix, especially if you plan on adding room reverb later.
And this is what you get:
Is it close to the real thing? Well, not exactly, but these fake timps serves the role that timps actually serve. Again, quick mix, and some tweaking still needs to be done. But a pretty cool way to add timpani to your music without actually having some lying around.
I took a floor tom and removed the bottom head. Probably for best results you should use an orphaned floor tom from craigslist or something, so you don't have to constantly take heads off and retune ones that are on your main drumset. The floor tom I used had an old 2-ply head (Coated Emperor), but for best results you should probably use a relatively fresh 1-ply head, like a Remo Ambassador.
You need to remove the bottom head so you can achieve a single pitch. With two heads this is virtually impossible, and real timpano only have one head anyway. Usually floor toms are tuned pretty damn low, so begin cranking the crap out of your head. Most timpani music sits in the lower bass clef region, around the C3 range. This is high for a floor tom, but it'll be much easier with a one ply head. I managed to get mine around an Ab2, roughly 40 cents flat. You don't have to achieve a perfect intune pitch, but the head has to be perfectly intune with itself. So tap around the edges by the lugs to make sure its uniform pitch.
There's many ways to mic this up. I took a ribbon mic, put it about a meter away from the drum, pointing at the shell, not at the head. This will bring out the resonance. Take your music, and pick a single note. Let's say a D3. Mark all the D3's in your music, or whatever. Create a new track, name it D3 or whatever, hit record. Play only the D3's. When you are done, pick another note in your music, create a new track, and repeat. This is where my bass drum line in marching band experience comes in handy, having to do split notes all the time.
As far as actual playing technique goes: real timpani are played toward the rim, away from the center. This brings out the most resonance. I find that playing on the floor tom, the center was the most resonant. Also, you MUST use mallets. Unfortunately I didn't really have good timpani or drum mallets, all I had were marimba yarn mallets. They did the trick just fine, but I would have preferred to have flufflier timp mallets to use.
Once you have tracked all the parts (or even during tracking) bring out a pitch shifter plug-in. I used Reaper's ReaPitch myself. Since I knew that the drum was tuned roughly to an Ab, I could easily ball park semi-tones, then with the help of a piano, get it more finetuned to the correct pitch. Do the appropriate pitch for each track.
If you don't mind spending more time on this, you could retune the drum for different groups of notes. For example, for the bottom notes, you may want to tune the drum to roughly F2, then for the higher notes, maybe a D3. This might prevent more of the curious artifacts from extreme pitch shifting from showing up.
So we have all our notes. Take a look at the sound. More likely, it'll be tinny as hell. Tight floor toms do not boom. If you've ever played real timpani (like I have for years) you'll notice that there's tons of undertones beneath the fundamental, making the timpani sound really bassy, warm, and huge, despite the fundamentals only being roughly an octave below middle C. We'll need to work on this.
There's probably multiple ways of doing this, but this is my process. In REAPER, I created a Timpani folder (a buss if you will). I used the UAD Pultec EQ plug-in for this. I set either 60 or 100 hz to +6 to +7, and adjusted for taste. This really brings out the warm low end that timpani are famous for. But we're still not quite there. Timpani are really resonant instruments....large hollow metal shells. So we'll need to create some artificial reverb to represent this. This is not room reverb, which I normally reserve for my UAD EMT 140. We're still sound shaping, trying to get the actual instrument as authentic as possible.
I played around with PSP PianoVerb a bit, but then decided to settle on Glaceverb, another freeware plug-in that's great for creating wacky reverbs. You can try different pre-sets, but I ended up going for the Warm Percussion and adjusted for taste. More than likely you'll need to tone down the wet mix, especially if you plan on adding room reverb later.
And this is what you get:
Is it close to the real thing? Well, not exactly, but these fake timps serves the role that timps actually serve. Again, quick mix, and some tweaking still needs to be done. But a pretty cool way to add timpani to your music without actually having some lying around.
