Drum overheads ambience?

[Delphine]

I'm wanting to create the sound of overhead mics on a purely electronic kit, well it's an acoustic/hybrid kit made from samples and layered with synthetic drums.

Anyway, to kind of 'gel' the kit together, I have got so far and I'm happy with things as they are, but I'd like to try to create a touch of ambience just to lift it from the digital silent background.

I've tried some short spaces with EQ on the returns but I was wondering if I might be missing the effect of what the overheads sound would be. So any tips on how to re-create a similar effect would be great.

[echosonic]

Suitable room convolution reverb on a bus send would be a good starting place IMO. Play with the send amount.

[Delphine]

Yeah I have it set up on a Pre-Fade so I can get a good idea of the totally wet signal, I am fiddling now and the best result for the sound I want is via a Gated Reverb with a bass cut. I am still not satisfied with the sound at the minute, it seems a bit 'tinny'. I haven't tried a convolution reverb yet as I never actually thought of it.

I'll have a look to see if I have some impulses that are suitable.

[musicwind]

If you have a good sounding room, I would not hesitate to put up a couple of room mics, in a 'stereo' configuration. Then, pump a mix of the durms through a couple of great sounding monitors in the room with the mics. The ambience should not be to 'big' sounding-just enough to add room sound, as if you were putting mics on real drums. I've done this before with great results, but the key is having a decent sounding room. Placement of the monitors, width and orientation of the mics is also important (there are theories for this), but just try moving things around until you find a sound that works.

[Racerdeth]

You mention a gated reverb type sound, of course I've no idea what music you're making but I would've thunk that'd be a bit odd to hear as an ambience verb.

I'd personally recommend having a couple of reverbs set up, one with that gated verb to send your snare to, and another as just a bit of a room sound (size/density to taste, I like a massive hall sound filtered to buggery so it doesn't play with the mix too much), and either send your drum bus as echosonic says or individual tracks (i'm a sucker for tweakability at times) to the roomy one, hey presto.

I've still not given any decent convolution verbs a go yet, I attempted to use one as speaker impulse responses for the lulz, but methinks I'll be waiting till i can afford to build a new PC before i get too hardcore into it!