GA1 - how to dampen drums

What settings can I use in Groove Agent 1 to create the sound of dampened toms and kick drums? Kind of like the effect you get when you stretch a strip of cloth across the drum and clamp it down under the head…

I haven’t found anything in the various GA1 knobs that has that effect.

Put a blanket over your head. :mrgreen:

I have never seen strip damping applied to toms and I haven’t seen a bass drum damped like that for years so it’s unlikely.
You can try careful eq and gating, limiting. You may have to tune them down as well as that is what dampening does, slowing down the head which also gives the head’s fundamental note (which can, contrarily, sound higher but that’s the timbre and not the pitch).
You could find , or record yourself, a set of toms (single headed would do) and bass drum that you have damped (I’d say about four dynamic level samples each drum) and import them to a GA1 pad set to use. Tuning should not be too much of an issue just as long as you got the intervals about a third apart. Not as tweaky as two resounding heads.

I’m thinking that it could be duplicated somewhat with low pass filter or similar EQ, in addition to something like a very slight tapering of the attacking and an appropriate attenuation of the decay.

This is pretty much the easiest way in GAO… also may be worth trying either an expander or envelope shaper to give a more ‘natural’ decay if you find gating a little too harsh as the sample editing capabilities are fairly limited in GAO.
Try a the low pass filter in GAO to ‘muffle’ the sound a little and possibly boost a little at around 4khz or so to put some ‘stick’ back in, then try the envelope shaper plugin rolling the release off a little and possibly some of the attack too. if your sound is still has too much sustain possibly try the expander to control it rather than the ES… ES is still useful for damping the attack slightly though… i recreated an old 70’s recording with BFD2 this way a little while back as the damping function in BFD2 didn’t quite do it the way i was after…
Hope that’s of some use!

Adjusting the decay would be what you are looking to do.

In GA1, adjust the release:

“I have never seen strip damping applied to toms and I haven’t seen a bass drum damped like that for years”

Hehe, yeah I guess its been 25 years since I dampened drums in this way, and only the snare and kick as I recall now.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try some of these settings. The slight softening of the attack and decay attenuation sound like the kind of thing I am after as long as I can make it smooth.

Have you got any noise removing plugins?

I rekon a half decent noise removing plugin might do the job.