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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.

When discussing the length of reverb tail to use on drum samples, we should take all opinions into account to get the fairest idea possible. A lot of music producers offer the perception that you can use more and more reverb as a song becomes slower, and this will help you avoid needing to add extra drum hits in for the sake of doing so – to fill space. The space is instead reserved for the reverb’s ‘tail’ – whether applied to all samples equally or for a single catalyst noise or sound – like a snare, which is a popular choice for this sort of sound application.

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 said all of the above, however, you can certainly test and note the results. Whatever sounds good is what you should go with. Don’t worry about semantics – as long as it works for your audience that is all that matters in music.

If you experiment and see what works for you, you’ll be well off to a natural instinct for applying effects like reverb to your drum samples in a way that is unobtrusive and even adds character to your tracks. Start by testing out the effects of it on single sample tracks and then to the drums as a unit, before moving on to the whole song in varying degrees of application. Also make sure to try different types, like plate and room reverb, then hall and open spaces. You’ll find that each adds something else and once you know when to use a specific type of patch, you’ll be ready for any beat making situation.

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