I'm trying to get a nice, thumpy kick drum sound for an electronica-style project. I'm doing the programming in Logic as a MIDI track, the instrument/audio object being a SoundFont with lots of kick drum samples that I made. I have a lot of difficulty in getting it right, so I hope some of you can help me out.

I'm using a pretty low-fidelity (88K) kick sample as basis. The higher-quality samples I have are simply too natural-sounding, there's too much room ambience, spill-over from the snare, etc.

I'm currently using: compressor (Logic) -> multiband EQ (Apple AU) -> guitar amp sI'm (Logic) -> matrix reverb (Apple AU).

The guitar amp (American Clean) and the matrix reverb (when tweaked right) give a LOT of low-end thumb, oompf, whatever. It's really cool. But I can't seem to get rid of a certain digital chipping-sound (you know, the *tzk* thats's barely audible but really annoying with headphones on). Whenever I kill the high frequencies on the EQ, the sound goes dull.

I'm thinking maybe I should change the order of the FX? Part of the problem is that the matrix reverb sounds very 'digital'. But none of the other reverbs in Logic sound good. Do I need to buy a quality reverb plugin ? Will an ordinary reverb give me more oompf? What is it about the matrix reverb that gives the sound that oompf, anyway?

Hope I made myself clear (I haven't being doing this for too long). Any advice is greatly appreciated.