Reverb, when applied to drum samples, is grossly underused in popular music. At the same time, though, a lot of the people who make use of the effect for their drum parts abuse it and degrade the drum samples to the point of annoyance.
When using the reverb on a single drum sample, you need to ask yourself the precise purpose that the particular sound is supposed to serve. Is it to add some spatial characteristics to the loop? If it’s a constant sound: will it drive your audience berserk after a few listens, or is it moderate in nature? Sometimes it is very easy to overuse and ruin an otherwise good song by using reverb incorrectly.
The length of the reverb on any particular cannot really be determined on a global scale, but needs to be adjusted on a project-by-project basis for maximum effect and precision. Some people say that you can use a longer tail on the reverb for samples in a slow-tempo song, and if you’re particularly aiming at one of the drum samples, it will relieve the others from needing to perform for the sake of performing. In a slow tempo song, you can either have many samples triggering all the time, back-and-forth collaboration, or strategic placements with reverb, which fills space effectively.
You can apply a single reverb patch to all of your drum samples, and there are hundreds of ways this can be achieved, and equally as many different programs and plug-ins to use for the task. With environment simulations (called Impulse Responses -or IRs for short), you can make your song sound like it was recorded at any world-famous location you have IR files for, such as the Louvre Museum if you wish. You can also apply the IR sound processing to your instrument tracks so that there is a total coherence between tracks.
Having offered these tips, though, you can really experiment as much as you want, as there are no limits in electronic music production. Whatever sounds good for you will usually work – you know your audience better than anybody else.
If any of this information is a bit over your head, don’t worry. You will soon get a natural knack for applying reverb at the right points and at the right speed, but you need to be ready to experiment as much as possible. When you can start to make creative decisions about effects like reverb on drum samples, you’ll be a few steps ahead of the competition. Also make sure to trial different plug-ins and software solutions. There are plenty of reverb effects out there, and different programs will have different workflows and different parameters. You may find something that just clicks with your workflow perfectly!
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