OK, so Steve asked about HOW I'm getting this taiko sound -- I'm never one for hard-fast rules when it comes to processing ANYTHING, but this should give you a basic recipe you can mess around with.
First, start with good ingredients -- get the best samples you can find, and make sure they have tonal variety when you play with different velocities. Lately, I've been using the taikos from EastWest's RA library. There is a wide variety of different taikos, but like most taiko samples, they still need a LOT of love.
Next I EQ them so that I get a good strong attack -- depending on the style of attack, that may mean maximizing the "tick" of the impact, or controlling the flabby lower-mid tones, or a combination of both. The best way to find that is to open up a parametric EQ, create an extreme peak (like +9 dB) with a very narrow Q (frequency range), and start sweeping it back and forth while playing the sample. You're looking for the articulation of the impact sound -- it's probably around 2-3 kHz... once you find it, play around with the size and shape of the peak until you come up with something more reasonable. If necessary, do the same thing to control the lower-mids -- create an extreme peak with a narrow Q, and sweep it around. If there's a problem, it's probably somewhere around 120 to 500 Hz, and you'll be able to tell when you find it because it will just LEAP out when you find the center of it. Now turn that peak into a notch (a subtractive EQ), and adjust the size and shape of it until you've got that drum under control... if that's not taming the low end enough, you may need to also do some low frequency rolloff as well...
Now it's time for compression -- I hit these suckers surprisingly hard -- it depends on the sample, but a 6:1 compression ratio is not out of the question. Make sure that the attack on the compressor is delayed 25-35 milliseconds -- you want to allow the transients to make it through without squishing them. If the transients are giving you problems, I adjust my EQ going into the compressor, but you could also slap in a limiter as well. But back to the compressor -- your release will depend on how fast you're playing the taikos -- just don't let it pump unnaturally, you want it to ease off as much as possible. Also be sure that you haven't lost your tonal variety with the velocities -- you're going to lose dynamic range, but if it still has that tonal variety, at least it'll
sound like it still has dynamic range...
OK, so if you'd lost any of the low end BOOM when you were EQ'ing, you've probably noticed you've gotten it all back (and then some!) with the compression. The only problem is, you may've also pulled up a bunch of sub-bass as well. So at this point, I'll throw on yet another EQ -- I usually only need a high-pass filter, and I keep the cutoff steep, but quite low -- usually around 20-40 Hz... after all, I added taikos because I wanted big, bassy drums, right?
The last step is that you may need a little reverb just to smooth out these babies, and make that drum not so violent and in-your-face... this is totally to taste, just don't add too much and watch the "pre-delay", as that's murder on that precious attack you just created with all this processing mumbo-jumbo...
That's it, in a nutshell... by the way, these basic guidelines will work with just about any big drum -- timpani, gran cassa, low toms...
Any questions...?
