I have now broken the habit of using reverb as an insert, but I am wondering what is best practice for the reverb sends from individual drum and percussion tracks (including kick reverb). Should they be left feeding straight to the Master channel, or be sent back to the drum group for bus compression first?
Awesome Question!
I run separate reverb for the parallel drum buss compression as i do to the ‘main’. The main reverb of course goes to the master like any other and the parallel buss stuff is fed only back to the parallel buss. All are sent from the individual drum/percussion elements.
I generally send reverb send back to drum bus.
I also do what @Elton described above for paralell busess, which sounds amazing BTW.
Thanks so much for your responses, guys!
My initial thinking was to feed back to the drum bus as @Paul said, as it would seem to keep the drums tight, especially for techno.
I’m intrigued at what @Elton suggested. I’m still a bit green with using parallel busses in Ableton. Would you mean that I set up one return track for the individual drums to send to for reverb, then feed that reverb send to another return track that has a compressor on it?
@Danny does a far better job at teaching parallel drum buss during the program, but essentially all drum elements are ‘routed’ to the mix buss as normal, but also , using sends, are sent to their own ‘group’ channel. This is then processed with typically heavy compression and then by mixing the 2 together, you get ‘New York Style Compression’. Great for adding power.
I don’t use Ableton, but you could take this to @justinc’s free Ableton user group session…
Cool. Thanks @Elton! I think I get it.
I might just drop in on Monday and ask what would be the most effective way to replicate this in Ableton. It’s a great platform for routing as there are so many creative ways to route things, but there must be a most commonly used way to set this up.