4 Steps On Mixing Reverb with Drum Buss Using the T-Imager Plug-in

Intro

Let’s say you have a drum track that contains multiple drum instruments, such as kick drums, snare, hi-hat, etc. You basically have them all in one single track in the mix, and now you want to apply reverb to the drum track without affecting the drum sounds in the low-frequency range, such as the kick drum or toms.

*Note: the drum buss must be a stereo track for this solution.

Follow the simple steps below and see how we can apply a nice reverb effect to the drum buss without the reverb affecting the kick drums. If you don’t have the T-Imager yet, grab your 3-day free trial from here.

Follow these four steps

1. Create an auxiliary track for your drum buss and have it parallel with the original track at 100%. Insert the T-Imager into it, and turn the balance knob all the way to the right until it reaches the 1.0 value, which means you only hear the sounds from the side frequencies on that AUX track.

2. Solo the AUX track, and while the playback is on, use the “Filter” and “EQ” sections on the right side of the T-Imager to shape the side frequencies from that drum track in the way you want.

3. Now insert your preferred reverb effect plug-in to the AUX track you’ve made, and unsolo the AUX track, to find the decent reverb setting to match your drums and the rest of your production.

4. Now, slowly bring down the parallel mix between the original and auxiliary track, which contains the reverb, until you feel the right balance between the drum and the reverb effect.

Check out the sound example below to fully understand how effective the T-Imager can be.
Download the loop sample ^{(Right click > Save as)} to examine this yourself.

Drum Track with Reverb:

So the T-Imager here is stopping the reverb from being applied to any frequencies in the center of your drum tracks so that you avoid the reverb being applied to low frequency-based instruments, even though all the drums are combined in one single track.

An alternative solution for not allowing the reverb to be applied to the low frequency-based instruments here is to use an EQ with a low-cut filter before the Reverb effect plug-in in the AUX track. However, you will still end up hearing the clicks from the low-based instruments, such as the kick drum in your wet reverb track, so if you check the example below, you notice it’s not a method as effective as the one with the T-Imager.

Drum Track with Reverb + EQ