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Publication date: August 2012 Published by George Robinson Getthatprosound.com Copyright George Robinson, All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Author does not assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Of course, please let me know if you find any errors and Ill correct them! The Purchaser or Reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Neither the Author nor its dealers or distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.
Contents 1.
Introduction........................................................................................ 4 What Is Reverb, & Why Is It Useful? Types of Reverb.................................................................................. 6 Algorithmic Convolution Modelled Anatomy of a Reverb Plugin............................................................. 7 Key Reverb Parameters Other Common Parameters Plugin Preset Categories Selecting, Setting Up & Tweaking A Reverb Plugin...................... 11 Nine Steps
2. 3. 4. 5.
Reverb Strategies: Assigning Reverbs to Instruments................ 15 No Reverb! The Two-Reverb Approach Three-Reverb Approach #1: Vocals, Drums & Instruments Three-Reverb Approach #2: Fore/Mid/Background..................... 17 Foreground Middleground Background Cathedral Reverb
6. 7.
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Introduction
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Types of Reverb
Algorithmic reverbs use calculations based on hypothetical rooms and other spaces to
generate their reverb sounds. Generally this gives a sharper, more artificial sound, typified by most hardware digital reverbs of the last 30 years. This is not necessarily a bad thing though musically were not always after the most natural sound, but the one that has the right character for the track. In fact, algorithmic reverb can be easier to place in a mix because it isnt as realistic as convolution reverb! Algorithmic reverbs also tend to be the lightest on the computers CPU, a significant consideration when youre using several instances in a busy mix.
Convolution reverbs use pre-recorded samples of real rooms and spaces to build Impulse
Response (IR) files of those spaces. The impulse response is then convolved with the incoming audio signal you want to process, hence the name. Convolution reverbs then, are generally far better at simulating real spaces than algorithmic reverbs the only major downside is that they also require significantly more CPU processing power. Generally then youll want to use convolution reverb where a lifelike quality is important for example, you can simulate the effect of a set of ambient room mics (more on how to this on the following pages). Convolution reverb can take a bit more work to sit in the mix than a good algorithmic reverb it can easily be a bit heavy in the low mids and lack high-end sparkle, as this is how real reverb tends to sound.
Modelling reverbs are designed to replicate the characteristics of particular vintage hard-
ware reverb units, such as the Universal Audio EMT 140 modelled on a real mechanical EMT plate reverb, or the spring reverb emulations found in many guitar amp plugins. These vintage reverbs can provide a fantastic contrast to the relatively soulless digital perfection of algorithmic or convolution reverbs, bringing additional character and nice tonal shaping to whatever you run through them.
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Pre-delay refers to the time between when the original sound starts and when you hear the
first of the reverbs early reflections. The greater the pre-delay time, the larger the perceived room size: imagine how in a large space such as a hall or a cathedral it will take longer for the sound to reflect back as it has more distance to travel. Increase the pre-delay time to put a bit of separation between the original sound and the reverb this way you get the spatial benefits of reverb without it cluttering or masking the mix (particularly useful for vocals and lead lines).
Early reflections are the first distinct echoes heard at the onset of the reverb.
No early reflections are heard until the sound has reached the nearest wall or obstacle and reflected back to the listener. This initial delay between the direct sound and the first reflected sound provides what is perhaps the strongest clue as to the room size: if the reflection returns as a distinct echo, it suggests that the reflective surface is both solid and flat. A more diffuse echo (one with less pronounced individual reflections) suggests irregular surfaces. The greater the spacing of the early reflections, the larger the space sounds.
Reverb time or decay time refers to the time it takes for the reverb tail to dissipate into
silence. Its not actually very easy to say when a reverberant signal finally disappears, so theres a standard measurement of reverb decay known as RT60: this sounds like a component of some complex equation, but it simply means the time taken for the level of the reverb to decay by 60dB. Simple! Long decay times work well on sustained sounds but. When you first start playing with reverb it seems obvious that a long overall reverb decay time is the best way to create the impression of
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High-frequency damping allows the high frequency decay time of the reverb tail to be
made shorter than the overall decay time. This emulates the way the surfaces and materials in real rooms absorb certain frequencies. Adjust this parameter for more or less realism, and also to colour the reverb as bright or dark to fit it into the mix (more on this shortly). It is basically a high-shelf EQ built into the reverb, but you could certainly use a separate EQ plugin for this after the reverb for greater control if needed.
This can be very useful for shelving off some muddying lows and mids and help you shape the reverb to fit the part and the track overall.
Mix or Wet/Dry controls are simply where you choose the proportions of the original
sound and the reverbed sound. If you have your reverb plugin set up as a send effect, the Mix knob should be set to 100% / Wet, as youll be controlling the proportions based on how much level you send from each individual track.
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Room / Hall / Chamber: The first reverb effects used for recorded music were created
with echo chambers - a loudspeaker would play the sound back in the chamber, and a microphone would pick it up again, including the echo of the room itself. The same principle still applies for simulated room and hall reverbs -youre capturing the ambience of a particularly sized and shaped space. For example, for a typical hall reverb that simulates the acoustics of large spaces such as concert halls, the reverb density would tend to build up over time and there will be a long reverb tail. A hall reverb can make sounds seem further away, so its of great use in putting some front-toback perspective into a mix. A room reverb, on the other hand, generally simulates a smaller space than a hall and is a good all-round reverb for instruments. Chamber reverb can be good for putting some air around synths, sampled drums and DId instruments.
Plate: After echo chambers came plate reverb, used a lot in the 60s and 70s. Plate reverbs
use a transducer to create vibrations across a large plate of sheet metal. A pickup captures the vibrations as they bounce across the plate, and the result is output again as an audio signal. Plate reverb tends to be bright and clean-sounding good for vocals and drums and is making something of a revival recently.
Spring: Uses a similar principle to that of plate reverb, but with a metal spring instead of a
plate. A transducer at one end and a pickup at the other are used to create and then capture vibrations within the spring. Being compact and relatively cheap to manufacture, many guitar amp designs ended up incorporating a spring reverb unit. Spring reverb adds a distinctive metal-
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reverb presets that can be used for unusual effects, such as reverse reverb that seems to build up in level rather than decay after the original sound. Reverse reverb is actually a variation on gated reverb, where a reverse-type envelope (slow attack, fast decay) is applied to the early reflections cluster. Like gated reverb, the main parameter is the time taken for the reverb to build up and cut off. The effect gives the sound being processed a cool backwards feel, even though nothing is actually being reversed. By the way, real reverse reverb (that actually starts before the dry sound) can easily be created in your DAW by first reversing your source material; then applying the reverb and bouncing/ reimporting the file onto a new track; and then flipping this new file so its facing the right way again, and bringing it up underneath the original material to taste.
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From the descriptions above and having even a very quick play with different reverb plugins, youll soon get a feel for what type of reverb algorithmic, convolution or modelled will suit your needs for particular sounds. So, having asked yourself what you actually want the size and space to sound like, whether you want it add brightness or body to the part being processed or to set it back in the mix a little; whether you want it to sound very natural, sparkly or otherwise particularly characterful, choose a plugin and set it up as a send or effect channel (the terms will be different depending on your DAW). Reverb is almost always best applied via a send-return effect configuration like this, so that a single plugin can be accessed from multiple channels in your mix. Also check two important things before going on: A) The reverb plug-in should be set to 100% Wet so its only outputting processed effect otherwise youll end up inadvertently boosting the channels overall level too. Turn all the way down or switch off Dry signal in the reverb GUI (again, different plugins will have slightly different controls and terminology). B) Make sure the individual channels sending to the reverb are set to post-fader. This means that the balance of wet and dry sound will remain constant if you adjust the send channels main fader, and you wont have any ghostly reverb shadows remaining in the mix if you fade out the channel completely at any point. (Pre-fader can be good when turning the send channel all the way down for disembodied pad effects).
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This is an optional step bepending on how confident and in-depth you want to go with your own programming here. Dont be afraid of using presets to get you in the ballpark of the sound youre aiming for quickly just dont use presets as an excuse not to tweak the reverb to make it fit as well as it possibly can. Also, dont interpret preset names too rigidly: just because a setting is called Small Room or Drum Plate doesnt mean it cant be almost exactly what you had in mind for your synth lead. When selecting a starting sound, whats most important is the overall acoustic signature and the amount of reverb being applied. If the frequency balance seems a little off, you can correct and tidy things up with EQ later. Keep things as large brushstrokes at this point, its all too easy to get bogged down in minor parameter adjustments!
The part of a reverb that is primarily responsible for its blending effect is roughly its first halfsecond. So whenever you try a new preset, reduce its length straight away to home in on the blending characteristics. If you have independent level controls for Early Reflections and Reverb Tail, pulling down the latter should help too. It doesnt matter exactly how short you make the reverb for the momentjust shorten it enough to make it into a brief, well-defined burst of reflections rather than an echoey decay tail.
Remember, if you want the impression of a longer/larger reverb, try playing with the pre-delay before extending the reverb decay time. This slight seperation of the reverb tail from the direct sound makes a huge difference in reducing mix clutter and improving clarity. If you want the reverb to act more as a subtle blending/thickening agent, at this stage you might also want to try boosting the early reflections and significantly reducing the tail to check it has the necessary tonal character. Another significant thing to be aware of is that you can link the pre-delay time to the track tempo this can be particularly important for EDM productions, where everything possible should enhance and work within the groove. If your bpm is 120, you have one quarter note every 500ms. You have one eighth note every 250 ms. You have one sixteenth note every 125ms, you have one 32nd note every 63ms. 64th notes at 32ms. In order to have the predelay trigger the reverb in a rhythmic fashion, it needs to be at one of these measures. Id go with 32 or 63ms, because we want the reverb to still feel attached
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Its quite normal to tweak this setting by ear at this point but you can also, again, apply some mathematical logic as we did for the pre-delay. If we want our reverb to rhythmically help pull us into the next beat, we want the reverb decay / tail length to fit into the correct amount of time between the notes. Going back to our 120 bpm example, you know that there will be a 250ms gap between each 1/8 note. So, taking 250ms and of course subtracting the pre-delay (lets say 34ms) gives us a rhythmically-related decay time of 216ms. At first the difference between this and another less precise amount may sound negligable, but once youve potentially compressed the reverb, the send channel, the group its routed
The size control will affect the tightness and tone of the reverb sound. Its mostly a matter of taste, but you can try dividing the reverb time by ten, and using this as a ballpark size in feet for your room. Then adjust the size up for a more spacey sound; down for more of a tighter echo.
These parameters essentially control whether the reverb is heard either as a series of discrete echoes or a denser, smoother tail of reverb how scattered the sound waves are. This is useful for further matching the reverb presence and tone to the dry instrument, and also again for helping push sounds further back in the mix (greater diffusion) without lengthening the reverb itself. Typically, smooth, dense reverbs tend to suit percussive
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Remember that you have the option to pan the reverb seperately from the original dry sound, which opens up quite a few possibilities. For example, if you want your reverb to help glue the mix together, panning the reverb quite wide gives the impression of the whole mix being encompassed and surrounded by it, in the same acoustic space. Or, you might want to keep the reverb relatively narrow and focused to stop things getting too cluttered in a busier mix. Experiment with panning the reverb to the same stereo position as the dry sound and then moving it away and around the stereo field: hear how, in the context of the mix you can use the reverb element of a sound like a highlighter or diffuser, depending on what works best.
Generally youll want to remove any frequencies below about 300Hz from the reverb return these will just add mud to the mix and clutter the valuable lower region, which should be kept clear for the bass and kick drum (that both work best with no reverb almost all the time). You might also want to cut away some of the very highest frequencies, which will help sit the reverb better in the mix and stop it drawing too much attention to itself. Beyond these basic adjustments, consider how much of the frequency spectrum you want the reverb to take up, and whether you want the reverb to be bright (synthetic, glittery, cool) or dark (natural, rich, warm). As already mentioned, bright-sounding reverb will push its way to the front of the mix and make its presence felt which can be good for EDM lead synths, for example. But place a bright acoustic guitar through that same reverb and it just wont sound right. Dark reverb, on the other hand, tends to have a more natural, receding quality to it, sitting behind the instrument and not cluttering the high end of the mix in the same way. Of course theres nothing to stop you using a reverb thats both warm and bright. The only problem is that if the reverb fills the whole frequency spectrum there will be less space left for your actual instruments. Youll generally get much more professional-sounding results by limiting the reverb sound to a specific frequency region, as you would any other musical part, and letting the complete mix work in combination to fill the spectral landscape. Remember that you might also need to bring up the overall level of the reverb return once youve cut out some of its frequency content like this.
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Reverb Strategies
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When deciding which configuration of reverbs will suit your music best, try going back to your reference tracks and listen carefully, making a note of which type of reverb you think is used on which instruments or sections, and how many there might be overall. Learn by example. See my post on How To Effectively Analyze Your Reference Tracks In 6 Steps for more tips on this.
Your first question should always be, Does it even need reverb? Dont fire up your plugins without thinking about it first. Lots of commercial tracks have next to no reverb at all, because they already have enough blend, size and atmosphere as it is. If youve recorded parts live with fairly loose, ambient miking (as opposed to close-miking which would minimise the natural sound reflections of the recording space), you might not need reverb to achieve the desired effect. Similarly, you might find the tighter, more distinct echoes of a delay effect work better in some instances than reverb.
This setup is streamlined and relatively straightforward, but still flexible enough for many mixing situations. One reverb would normally be set for a short, bright sound (probably a plate sound) for drums and percussive sounds, whilst the other would be longer and warmer, providing a nice rich quality for vocals and solo instruments. Plus theres nothing stopping you sending some instruments to both reverbs (percussive one first) for a bonus third spatial effect.
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Foreground Reverb
Our first, foreground reverb will be tight, being made up of a short burst of early reflections and a very short tail, to the point where it might be almost indistinguishable from the main sound. This is fine though, as this reverb is for adding only a very discrete sense of space to parts that otherwise we want to be quite upfront and uncluttered. In fact, short ambience reverbs like this actually give sounds a sense of extra body and density, and are a favourite tool of many pros for a pleasing thickening effect of guitars, synths and drums. Short reverbs have a number of distinct uses and musical advantages. Primarily, short reverbs negate the clutter that longer reverb tails tend to bring. This is immediately noticeable on rhythmic elements (like drums, for example, or rhythm guitar) when you need the reverb tail to fit between the notes rather than smear itself across the entirety of the bar. Using a short reverb, therefore, will retain all the punch of the rhythm section, but still provide some sense of acoustic space to sit your instruments in. Its a bit like bringing up overhead mics on a live drum kit recording: you get a subtle but important sense of the sounds being in a real acoustic environment. Find some good small room or ambience presets on your chosen reverb plugin as a good starting point. Tweak the wet/dry ratio and youll probably find that you only need relatively small amounts of reverb to deliver the required real space effect without it becoming too obvious. Also try tweaking the relative balance between the early reflections and the reverb tail, so that you get more or less of the initial flutter of bright early reflections rather than the more diffuse reverb tail. Well also look at the middle ground, where reverb becomes a more noticeable effect, and how finer details like the colour and type of reverb become so essential to the success of the results. Finally, well also explore some long cathedral-like reverbs and see how the extremities of the effect can become a creative springboard for new sonic exploration.
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Middleground Reverb
Middleground reverbs begin where the effect can be identified as a specific sound itself. A good place to start is to select a preset with a distinct reverb tail of perhaps 1-2 seconds. With this second of our three reverbs, the type and particular characteristics of the reverb become far more audible, and therefore youll want to spend a little more time selecting just the right sound to match your source material than you needed to for your shorter foreground effect. This is where the character of your reverb strategy is expressed: try playing with the high and low frequency damping controls to adjust how bright or dark the mid reverb will sound.
The part weve all been waiting for: the sort of reverb that makes things sound truly huge. This kind of reverb becomes a special effect, a feature of the mix in its own right. The thing to remember here is that used sparingly on a few select instruments or effect hits, massive reverb will give a great sense of depth and contrast; but plaster it over too many elements in your mix and were back to mush city. Pushing reverb times beyond six seconds or more takes the effect into far more spacious and dramatic territory, arguably making it perfect for sounds that need to sit at the rear of the mix or for deliberate shock treatments (such as large trailer hits, when reverb is used as a sound effect in its own right). Where your short reverb will be discrete and subtle, and your midground reverb quite disciplined as it needs to relate strongly to the source material, you can let your proverbial hair down and be a bit more extreme with the wet return on your big background reverb. In fact, one of my favourite ways for creating unique and atmospheric pads is to put sounds or instrument notes through a massive reverb 20-30 secs! make the reverb send pre-fader and turn the channel fader right down; now you have just the reverb return, creating an incredibly ghostly and haunting wash that often sounds nothing like your original source sound. Listen to Jon Hopkins album Insides or his soundtrack for the movie Monsters to hear masterful examples of this effect in action. It also works really well on backing vocals and synth pads. As with midground reverb, the timbral/textural qualities of your massive reverb will be even more pronounced, so try a few different hall, cathedral and custom settings to start with. A convolution reverb plugin such as Altiverb (a favourite of many pro studios) is the obvious initial choice for long, natural reverb tails there are many great IR files sourced from massive cathedrals and suchlike. But dont overlook trying an algorithmic or modelled reverb if you have one, like the awesome Lexicon PCM plugin, whose super-long reverb seems to float with infinite sustain. Any super-long reverb will tend to work best if its relatively dark, with more pronounced high and low frequency damping so that you dont swamp the entire mix!
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Compression can be a great solution to the conundrum of wanting to push a sound further back in the mix with a bit of reverb, but without robbing it completely of its power and presence in the mix (as reverb can also tend to do). Compress the reverb tail and you get the psycho-acoustic depth-creating effect of the reverb while also keeping the sound present and as upfront as you want.
This is worth repeating: In situations where you want to use a large reverb but keep the sound towards the front of the mix, consider increasing the reverbs pre-delay time to around 70150ms. Long pre-delay settings will detach the reverb tail from its source, allowing the original source to sound up-front but still have a sense of ambience floating behind it.
Long before plugins and hardware units, the only way to add reverb to tracks was literally to play them back in specially constructed chambers, rooms lined with tiles or other reflective materials. The room would contain a single speaker and and a microphone: youd play back your dry sound on the speaker and record the newly reverbed version to be reinserted back into the mix. The reverb tone and time could be adjusted by literally moving the speaker and/or the microphone.
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EQ isnt the only effect to use in combination with your reverb try setting up chains of effects on your reverb send channels, such as distortion, phasing, or any type of filter modulation, and you can give stock sounds a character all their own. To create a subtly shimmering reverb sound, try adding chorus, flanging or pitch shift to the reverb. A great sound for synths and keys can be achieved by treating the reverb with chorus this sounds completely different to simply applying the chorus directly to the synth part, adding a nice subtle swirling quality. You can also do the reverse of this: adding reverb to the return of other insert or send effects. This works particularly well with delay for a really classy and subtle overall effect.
6. Sometimes Its Best To Get As Far Away As Possible From Polite Blending
Listen to your reference tracks and youll notice that many modern productions apply reverb only selectively a lot of pop, urban, and electronic tracks benefit from some elements being poorly blended, so that theyre right in your face at the front of the mix.
A classic mistake that inexperienced producers make is to add too much reverb. When you first get into using reverb, you will make mistakes and add what seems like appropriate amounts of reverb, only to listen back a couple of days and wonder what you were thinking. Its easy to do. Sometimes, the more you listen
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All reverbs offer unique and subtle sonic contributions to your audio that defy measurement. Take two different reverbs and set them to the same patch, dialling in the same values for all their adjustable parameters, and theyll still sound different. No symphony hall sounds exactly the same as any other. No plate sounds exactly like any other. Always listen for what you like; ultimately its just the end sound produced that matters, not the reverb time, not the algorithm, and certainly not the reverb make and model number. Then, add these reverb presets/sends to your DAW template, ready for your next track.
Despite being associated forever with the 80s and Phil Collins drum fills, gated reverb can be just the thing for adding power to your EDM or rock snare drum. Send the snare drum to an aggressively compressed, very long reverb patch (try a plate preset with a modified reverb time of five seconds) to create a bed of noise that will take ages to decay. Then add a noise gate to get rid of most of the crazy reverb tail. The result is a punchy gated reverb. Its also common to set the gated reverb to a musical note value so it works in sync with the overall groove try giving the decay on the snare a dotted eighth note feel, for example.
When taking samples, we often have to truncate the end to get rid of any unwanted sound, but run the risk of abruptly cutting short any ambience in doing so. This ambience can be replaced using a digital reverb. After shaping the envelope of the tail end of the sample run it through the reverb unit and resample the whole sound with its new reverb tail.
A great benefit of reverb, apart from its ability to impart depth to your mixes, is the way it can be used to spread your instruments further across the stereo field. If you want to enhance the sense of spaciousness still further, set the reverb to a different pan position than the original sound. Alternatively, pan the reverb to the same position as the source part, and youll have a more tightly focused sound overall. Often the best strategy is to use a combination of more targeted and focused mono reverb sends with more lush stereo
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Apart from special effects, you might be wondering when youd ever use non-linear reverb settings. One useful application is on short, shapr percussion sounds such as congas, triangles and claves, whose transients can last mere milliseconds and therefore disappear easily into a busy mix. Try adding a subtle nonlinear reverb to lengthen the perceived duration of such percussion sounds slightly, making them easier to hear and therefore easier to slide into the mix.
Reverb isnt the only tool for blending sounds, adding depth to the mix or for bringing parts together into a cohesive whole. Short delays will also work very well, and some producers always prefer delay over reverb for the fact that it doesnt threaten to muddy and clutter
Normally, reverb sends are taken post-fader, so that direct signal level adjustments are reflected in their reverb returns. However, try setting your reverb send channel to pre-fader send, and then muting the original sound so youre left only with the reverb itself. This is
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You dont have to set your effects and then leave them like that for the entire duration of your track. Use automation to ride the different reverb parameters for different sections of the track, or even set up one reverb for verses and another to add extra lift in the chorus. If youre producing electronic/dance music of of any subgenre, its perfectly normal to be constantly shifting and changing the effects throughout to bring life and movement to the repetitive groove.
Consider when in the extended process of recording, arranging, producing and mixing you plan to treat each element in your mix with reverb. Generally its not a good idea to record with reverb, as you cant then adjust it later In the context of the full mix. On the other hand, giving yourself the ultimate flexibility afforded by plugins and mixing completely In The Box has its own drawbacks: its just very hard to stop continually tweaking and actually commit to a particular sound or effect when you know you can change it any time you want. Again, this is why its important to have a strategy: it can be a good idea to set up your reverb send channels before you start, complete with specific predetermined settings, and not really tweak them unless you really have to. If youve set up a good selection of reverbs, youll be covered, and you might even finish the track! Anyway, the point in the creative process at which you begin applying reverb to your sounds might make a significant impact on your perception of that sound, and therefore on which direction you take the track in. On a more technical level too, if youre using reverb primarily as mix glue or to give the impression of size, it might be best to get your mix balancing done first; whereas reverb used for one-shot effects, for tonal colouration or to be the main component of a sound (such as a washy pad) will clearly need to be effected earlier on. Strategically, it can also help to decide if you want a particular reverb to be almost like an independent instrument in its own right, as though the dry and wet signals were individual parts, or if you want to treat it more as an integral part of the instruments final sound.
A simple but classy trick for introducing complexity and movement to sounds is to treat them with two different reverb plugins simultaneously, panned left and right and balanced with the original sound. Alternatively, you could pan them together, using the two different reverbs as a subtle blend rather than keeping them separate. This can be taken to a micro level: for example, to create the ultimate snare drum sound, chop
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As ever, experiment with not using reverb at all, or at least not on every sound. Always try and make sure that you keep at least something in the mix completely dry this will maintain the front-to-back contrast that you want in your mix.
I wouldnt say never use reverb on bass or kick drums its an integral part of booming bass hits in electronic music and movie trailers but things will get very muddy very quickly down there, so use caution. If you do want to add reverb to lower frequency elements, insert an EQ after it as usual but roll off just the extreme lows from the reverb return.
Every track has one or two lead or signature instruments that sum up the style and tone of the whole piece, often playing the main hook or melody. Reverb can be an integral part of setting the best sound and tone of these parts that makes them stand apart: think of using a really characterful gated reverb on guitars, a shiny and bright space-age reverb on lead synths, or a vintage Space Echo treatment on the snare, for example.
20. Before Setting Up & Applying Reverb, Ask yourself what role you want it to fulfil
Are you aiming to enhance the character of the sounds to be treated, or is it more a case of helping the sounds sit better in the mix as a whole? Of course, you may want to do both (and the best solutions will probably do so), but even considering the question as a starting point can be very useful in getting on the right track quickly.
Applying reverb can alter the tonal quality of an instrument dramatically, as the echoes that make up the reverb body have the capacity to phase-cancel with the original sound once they are added into the mix side-by-side. This is something to be careful of avoiding if you want to keep the tone of the dry part as it is but it also means you can use reverb purely for its tonal shaping capabilities alongside EQ, applying enough reverb to bed the sound into the mix more smoothly.
Certain sounds respond better or worse to certain reverb types, so although there are no
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Sometimes no matter how much EQ you apply or how many parameters you tweak, a reverb just wont do what you want it to. For example, its fairly common for the transients of a sound to produce distracting flams or stereo ricochets when reverb is applied to them. In this case, you can try inserting a transient processor on the return channel immediately before the reverb itself, to tame the sound being treated with reverb but keeping the original intact. Its also quite usual to put a de-esser before the reverb on a vocal track (if the vocal hasnt already been de-essed), so that you dont emphasize any sibilance with a wash of bright reverb! Finally, dont forget you can side-chain compress reverb sends just as you would pads, synths and bass in electronic and dance tracks. This can help both for tying smaller reverbs into the main groove and avoiding clutter, but it can also be used on a much more obvious scale to create a cool rhythmic sucking effect on your cavernous trance and techno reverbed hits.
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Conclusion
Now you should have all the skills and know-how to select the right reverb plugins, set them up correctly for each given task, and plot an overall reverb strategy for each of your mixes.
Of course theres more to using reverb like a pro than could fit into this ebook - reading about the parameters and techniques is valuable, but the only way to get really competent in anything is to practice and gain as much experience mixing and applying the tools and techniques as you possibly can. So with that in mind, keep this ebook handy, print it out and have it with you as you practice then as tricky scenarios come up (as they always do) youll be able to quickly refer to the relevant tip or parameter setting and move forward efficiently and with minimal wasted effort. Take the next step... and of course decide whether the step is made of stone or wood, whether its in a small dry room or an echoey church etc. etc... ;)
I hope this ebook will be helpful in your next sonic adventures - let me know how you get on at george@getthatprosound.com, and dont forget to check out the GetThatProSound blog regularly for new posts, more tips and a couple more ebooks coming soon.. Best of luck, George Robinson Get That Pro Sound
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