Duplicating the overheads to keep the toms and cymbals separate is nice!
Question on this topic: How do you separate? Are you using high pass to keep the cymbals and low pass to keep the toms? Are you manually editing the toms or the cymbals out (if so, how do you keep cymbal ring when you edit out the toms...not exactly sure how to phrase that, but you should know what I mean)?
I don't separate the cymbals, just the toms. The cymbals are part of the overheads. For that matter, so are the toms, but I separate them to be able to
control their volume, AKA turn them up. Also, usually the frequencies I often cut from my overheads are frequencies I want to keep on my toms. So, let's say I cut 3db at 150hz (just an example) off my overheads, I'll boost that same frequency by 3db on my tom track to even it out at 0db.
Also, as far as cymbal ring into the toms, that's almost never an issue. You usually hit a cymbal at the end of a roll, which is after you hit your toms, almost never before you hit the toms. So cymbal ring almost never gets in the way of a tom hit.
Like I said, depending on the type of music, in my case, I only hit my toms a few times a song (a roll going into
the chorus, for example), so it's not that much work to cut out everything but the toms on a track because I'm not playing my toms all through the tune in most cases.
