Getting a good balance on P-Bass and Hammond 2 XRL kit

I hadn’t fooled with the individual instrument levels very much before posting this kit. Now I’ve had a chance to try it out, and I have some recommendations. I use a Roland KC-350 keyboard amp for the Beat Buddy. It has 4 input channels, so I could use just it with guitar and vocal going into the 2 channels that are not taken up by the beat buddy. Each channel has its own volume, and there is a 3 band EQ, Bass, Mid High. I tried the amp with everything flat, midway settings, and found the bass to be a little hot, and was able to adjust it just by turning down the bass EQ about 1 1/2 notches. Within the kit. If you double click on it in BBM to bring up drumset maker, you will see that the Bass samples are all at vol 0, which means they are at the maximum setting. As bass notes are not generally played in chords, and since none of these were clipping, I left it that way. If you don’t have an amp EQ, you may want to bring these bass notes down to about -1.5 to -2. Let your ears be the guide, but test it on your live play system, not on the BBM through the computer.

I brought all the percussion pieces down to -6 on the average. Some cymbals, were brought down to -9.

The organ samples are very nice individually, but when combined into chords, they tend to want to clip the amp. Bringing these all down to -6 fixed that.

In summary, with my bass at 0, and my drums (except some of the cymbals) and organ at -6, I have a kit that can easily be balanced with the amp. Your system WILL vary from this, but these should be good starting points. Similar settings are recommended for the other XRp kits, except for the Jazz Trio brushes. The brushes kit is softer and does not need to be reduced as much to get a nice balance. You may be able to balance it just by lowering the amp volume for the drum channel.

Enjoy!