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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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Why would you want to generate snappy kick and snare drum samples? Well, as we all know, there’s a serious loudness war going on, and what better way to drown out the competition that have the rhythm track in your songs simply cut through any speaker set or car radio and be instantly recognizable and catchy? With the importance placed upon drum samples and their arrangement and sound, budding music producers pay no attention to this topic at their peril!

Making your own drum samples ’snap’ is not very hard with a little practice. You can even use free tools, these days. Just search “free sound editor” on Google to see a list of results; Audacity is a great one! Using compression and equalization are great to begin with. If your work-flow already includes these, good on you – you have a head start now, so use it wisely. Besides using these effects, you can edit sound waves manually, and in this case you would be looking to alter the sound spikes, accentuating the initial attack manually for your drums.

Both software and hardware effects usually have factory patches that display the capabilities of the effects unit. This is very useful for the budding audio engineer and drum samples editor; feed the device some standard samples – but first analyze the samples and really listen to them – then start applying some of the default effects, not the parameter levels and starting doing A/B tests on the sound; that is, before and after the effect. If you can start to internalize the changes and link the sound alteration to the settings, you will be well off!

Compressing your drum samples to add snap is a very common road taken by mixers and music producers alike. Sometimes it can be a bit hard working out what the knobs and dials actually do, so writing down – in your own words – what the changes do to the drum samples, will help you out a lot when making critical decisions later on. Try out different software and hardware compressors, as they also sound a little bit different and you will have trouble with some, while others will be easy to work for you.

When you’re making notes on the settings you change, try to describe them in plain English – by that, I mean all the effects and the way they change the sound. If you can well and truly comprehend the way that a sound is effected by the different switches and level meters, you will be well-equipped to make real decisions in a studio environment. Keep a sheet that includes the different settings, supposed effects (according to the manual) and perceived effects (the stuff you hear).

As a last tip, you should always try to choose the correct drum samples to start with. If your library is big enough, you really won’t have that much of a problem, which is a good thing. The less you need to tweak and alter your current selection of samples, the more time you will have making the actual beat. It will be easier for you to translate the rhythm and sound in your into the sequencer and move on to the other instruments and such, so keep expanding your sounds.

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