Anyone have any pointers on mixing rack toms?

Specifically what plugins would one use? Are there any available on Reaper?

ReaEQ, Reacomp and ReaGate are all included in Reaper. Just need to get the right settings! Then there is Reaverb and Reaverbate. You have to download impulse files for Reaverb. You can find links on the forum or in Kenny Gioia videos, or just search for "reverb impulse files free" on the interwebs. The Kenny Gioia videos are extremely helpful. They are on the Reaper website and also for sale.

Thanks, that was helpful.I was also thinking reverb.thnaks again

EZDrummer has recorded each hit of each drum through all of the mics at the same time, and when you trigger that drum, it plays back all of those signals at once. The overhead "tracks" are very much true overheads. I'd suggest that the problem with cymbals being too loud in the overheads is very often that they're being hit too hard (relative to the other drums) to begin with. With real drums, you have to either punch the drummer a couple times and make him retrack, or live with it and find a way to salvage the mix. With EZDrummer, you just select all of the MIDI notes triggering cymbals and reduce their velocity. Or, OTOH, another cool thing about EZD is that you can render the overhead twice, once without cymbals, and once with nothing but cymbals. Try to get a real drummer to do that. :)

Real drums? If the drummer has any consistency at all, use the recorderman or Glyn Johns methods and the toms will sound great. Overheads are all about placement so there is no need for the cymbals to be too loud unless you want the OHs to focus on the brass. Placement also matters in reference to the kick/snare, make each OH the exact same distance from those (measure with a string if needed). Not only is distance important but you can cross-shoot to reduce brass volume at the same time. This will fix a huge number of issues and make the drum kit sound focused, solid and thick. Many miss this finer point where the OHs are 80% of the sound (aka always get those right first pretending there is no kick/snare mic), and if the snare and kick are properly aligned in the OHs, the actual kick and snare mics in reality only play a supporting role for snap/thump. With all this in place one can get great toms with a four mic setup. Otherwise, add the tom mics to this same setup but in reality, every added mic makes getting a great sound harder so each added mic truly needs to earn it's reason for existence. IOW, beyond certain specific styles, if you are throwing gates and HPF on everything, you've already lost. ;)

For mixing live toms, I'm finding that I don't like to gate. I automate a little to lower the bleed when toms aren't being played, but I let the toms ring! I use only stock eq and a touch of compression. I like close mics, mixed drummer perspective, and turned up pretty loud if it's just for accents. I turn down big rolls a little bit.

I've found that the CLA Drums plugin works really well on toms, especially with the soft gate activated. You get most likely get a pretty perfect tom sound with just a few clicks. It's currently on sale for $49 for 39 more hours.

I also almost never gate toms live. Maybe if it's really straightforward ROCK tom hits with absolutely no grace notes... and then also some issue making me feel the need to go for a gate at the same time. Otherwise my comment is "Oh, you can't gate live toms. It doesn't work!" Always grace notes quieter than snare bleed here and there and then those hits that need the extended ring on the tail sometimes. And then I take the tracks home and flip everything around. Main drum sound comes from the overheads and the toms get gated and used for support. Except... "gated" here means strip silence with manual intervention for any quiet hits and tail rings that need special attention. Same for my studio recordings as well. In small and medium rooms the drum kit has a lot of live sound unamplified, so you often don't need to reinforce that element. Overheads are often not ever turned up on the board. (Also partly because the cymbals are usually bleeding through the vox mics a bit. Sometimes one even puts a deesser on the lead vox mic to manage the cymbal bleed.) Bring the recording home and you find those overhead tracks to be the most important element of the kit. Big rooms and/or outdoor shows get closer to studio mixing as the entire sound (including the drum kit) needs to be reinforced. Now the overheads actually get used live. I almost always have to gate the kick live to keep the bottom end from ringing with the bass (or just feeding back on its own). In all cases I record the prefader inputs so I can redo anything like that back in the studio (for the live recordings).