I just read in another post, on another forum hosted by a tremendously popular session-studio drummer, that tuning drums to sound good behind the kit sometimes can leave them sounding poorly out front of the kit. Then these other guys went on and on about this intangible theory that if your drums are tuned high and ringy they sound better to the listeners in a big room. One of the guys is a local live sound engineer whom I actually respect quite alot. I'm preparing my argument to call bull!@#$ on these heavy thinking drum gurus. My drumkit sounds gorgeous behind it, out front of it, to the side of it, 50 feet away from it, or basically anywhere you can hear it.
The moral of the story is, if your instrument sounds bad geography won't make it sound good. Please don't tell me that high pitched ringy toms sound good to people. These guys are really in for a counter opinion.
In closing, this old school drummer once had a sound tech. ask him to change his snare tuning because it wasn't getting what he needed at the console. This old drummer for one of the first times in his career got pretty angry and said, "It sounds good right here!!!" The tech. realizing he had just angered Niel Peart made the adjustments with the mic. placement and some parametric eq.
O.K. Mr. Hendrix, stop playing that thing upside down and left handed, your note selection is a bit too unique and it doesn't really sound that good out front.
Jason
