I would love to know how to make my drums sound like this. It sounds to me like latin percussion with some kind of filter, phaser, and reverb but I suspect there's more to it.

 

Try setting up a delay on a Return channel with a saturator and an eq and have the Return feed back into itself. You can use the eq shape the output and just making tiny adjustments to the drive of the saturation can seriously juice up the sound. Cut the lows around 150 Hz and play with the saturation curve to bring in some harmonics and you can get pretty metallic, all the way from kalimba to steel drum. Eq to taste.

I would set up 2 more audio tracks and have them doing some parallel compression of the dry signal before everything hits the FX chain and another one for the wet so you have more control over the drum mix.
Then play with the dry/wet on the delay and bring in the dub delay at your leisure. You also could set the output of the delay to a phaser.

Mix up the device order in the chain but keep an eq at the end to shape the sound and go easy on the saturation. In my experience it's more effective to have 2 or more plugins applying subtle saturation as opposed to 1 at a higher rate. If you use multiple saturators/eqs in your chain, use different ones from different developers and see if you can get some interesting interplay.

This works audio loops but try using something like Chromaphone 2, Drum Lab or Microtonic.

Hope this helps.

 

For the classic dub sound spring reverbs are a must. Units like Grampian, fisher spacexpander etc are old skool bits of kit. Altiverb has vintage spring models I use for my dubbed out stuff. Like Pinkman said having a delayed feedback loop is also a dub technique, however having that return controlled by a real fader on a separate channel with which you can ride it is the best way I've found.

Sounds to me like the whole kit is being sent to a short room verb, or it's the sound of his live room, rim shot send to spring verb being modulated as he rides the board with glitches and filtering in between.

Big fan of OTT here also, peace.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2017

Roger Big R Dub Kit + Echoboy

 

Splendid, you each brought up something I was hoping to know more about. Thanks!