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Hi,

Please bear with me on this as I am a complete novice

Is it common practice to EQ a reverb return when running it across the whole kit? I am having a play with my P100 verb and even at very low send levels I get a thunderous low end generated by the bass drum.

Any guidence here appreciated.

Simon

Considering that you could want to use the reverb also for other sounds there is a better way than eq. the return, if you have to use it in a full drum kit and can't have drum pieces in different tracks but only on a stereo track: use 2 stereo channels of the mixer with the same drum mix, one channel will be sent to the mix bus totally dry, the other channel will be removed from the stereo mix, but, after being equalized to remove the low end, sent to the reverb. You can also further shape the eq of the second channel to obtain a different sounding reverb return, leaving the reverb itself unaffected for the other sounds.

Don't eq. the return but shape a good send.

a lot of (software) reverbs have an integrated eq of some sort (pre and/or post) and for very good reasons... like your situation.
i hardly ever put reverb on an entire drum mix for your 'low rumble' reason without eq'ing. i'd rather set aux levels per sound or sound groups (hi hats and cymbals/snare/toms).

of course, i'm mainly talking about electronic music...

yes and indeed, eq-ing (before) the reverb is quite normal, splitting the drum channel into a dry and a 'dummy' is also a good solution.
You can even reverberate a whole mix if done carefully: lowcut below 800Hz or even (much) higher, and highcut above 8kHz or something, just listen what you like to be the best.
A somehow 'dry' but otherwise good mix can get that little air and 'room' (depth)that makes it shine, I did it quite often, with great results

Thanks for the advice all.

I tried the dummy kit method but even with very extreme eq (24db high pass) I was still getting significant bass drum verb even at high filter cut-off. Forced me to get the manuals out and finally worked out how to get individual outs from Jamstix and Tracktion so all is now much more controlled.

One other issue I am having is that my bass drum sound is nothing like the majority of commercial sounds of the same genre. I grabbed a load of random CD's last night and after some critical listening I noticed that the bass drum on these contains almost no release i.e. the sound is just a thwack (attack) and nothing after? All of the raw bass drums from Jamstix have an attack and release phase i.e. you can hear the resonance of the drum fading. I tried a number of different bass drums and all have this sound (in fact its this resonance that seems to differenciate the sound). Am I missing sometihng here?

Simon

grappa wrote:I tried the dummy kit method but even with very extreme eq (24db high pass) I was still getting significant bass drum verb even at high filter cut-off.

then you do something wrong.
are you sure you put the dry/wet knob on the reverb to max wet?

about the kick: I have thousends of kicks in my sample collection.
If you don't like the ones you have you just have to look for other ones, on the internet you can find a lot, even for free, or buy a sample cd with kicks and/or samples of classic drummachines.

whatever they tell you and whatever may be hip - the 808 will always be a classic

kk_booom, Tom

i use BFD, don't know Jamstix at all but i'm betting there's a release control for the kick. It might be called 'damp' or 'dampening' - also try the tune control if you have one.

Thanks for the pointer Mr A. Jamstix does indeed have a damp and tune parameter for each sample and it does exactly what I need.

Thanks for the help all.

Simon