Which instruments feel closer or farther away than this sound? Remember, our perception of distance is also influenced by volume lower level sounds feel more distant and high frequency content removing the highs will push a sound to the background.
Is the reverb felt rather than heard? That means short decay times or slapback delays are being used. Room noise, reverberation, and any sense of space is typically removed from samples to give producers ultimate flexibility for including those sounds in their own productions. They unknowingly stick a bone-dry sample into a song and call it a day. Our ears would never hear a hi-hat the way a microphone does.
Adding a room reverb to your hi-hats — and really all drums — is essential for creating the feeling that these sounds are all happening in a real, live space. Running reverb in-line on tracks is a great way eat up your processing power. This leads me to the single most important strategy for using reverb in your DAW:.
This tactic alone will take you from a reverb amateur to an up-and-coming pro. Instead of placing plugins on individual tracks, create a return channel , sometimes called an aux track or bus these terms are used interchangeably.
Now you can send any track in the project to this bus, at any level you choose. Allowing any dry signal to pass would simply increase the level of the original source. Using reverb on a bus gives you a couple massive advantages. Apart from sending multiple instruments to your reverb to create a sense of cohesion, you can now Processing your reverb bus is a best practice.
Abbey Road Studios has a signature way of processing reverb: They EQ the bussed signal before sending it to a plate or chamber. Start with a low-cut around to Hz, and a high-cut anywhere between 5 kHz and 10 kHz. The low-cut and high-cut filters ensure that only the sweet spot of your source signal hits the reverb. This helps to keep the character of the vocal present and up-front. This is one of my favorite tips for working with reverb. Have you ever found a setting that sounds great for the reverb tails The solution: sidechain the main instrument to a compressor on the reverb bus.
Place a compressor after your reverb, and set the sidechain input as the source signal in this case, the lead vocal. By finessing the attack and release times I prefer a faster attack and slower release , the reverb stays out of the way of the lead vocal while blooming in the gaps between phrases.
Most DAWs have their own amp emulations, but you can use any distortion. Amping your reverb creates a commercial brightness that can be quite effective on lead sounds.
The OTT compressor on light settings will also brighten up verbs and give them a modern, electronic sound. Placement matters - you can either distort the source sounds before it hits the reverb, or take the whole reverb and re-amp it. Try both out to see what works best for your track. You can go to town processing the sound, trying new things, and using the space you create for multiple instruments at once.
In real life, sounds are constantly shifting in and out of our hearing. We approach each other to speak, a car drives by, a door closes, the sound of a piano drifts from an open window as we walk by Think of the amount of signal you send to the reverb bus like a camera zooming in and out on the sound. Bringing the send level up increases the volume of the reverb, tricking our brains into believing the sound is farther away.
You can make your music come alive by automating reverb sends. How would it feel if you were introduced to a new guitar lick that felt far away, but by the time the chorus hit it was right next to you?
You could craft an emotional journey through a space of your own creating, or you could find a reverb level that works and call it a day. One is uncharted territory. The other sounds like a live recording from a stage.
I like to automate the vocal reverb send during key moments, like at the end of a chorus as the song crescendos into a breakdown or epic build. These little reverb and delay throws can be the difference between a killer production and a flat track.
One of the most important lessons in stepping up your reverb game is to embrace the power of short reverbs decay time of less than one second. Short reverbs create ambience and air around sounds. They are felt rather than heard, and many producers spend years overlooking what a short reverb can do for their music.
This is extremely effective at making all your sounds feel like they belong together. Set up a reverb bus in your DAW, EQ the bus with the Abbey Road Trick, and send nearly everything in your track except the kick and sub-bass to this room reverb at small amounts no louder than dbs.
From time to time, solo this room reverb bus to see if it matches the overall vibe of your mix. Are the guitars dominating the room? Some plug-ins are designed to analog reverb units, such as plates and springs. But with digital reverbs, one of the first things you'll need to adjust is the algorithm, which allows you to choose which type of reverb you want to use.
Some reverbs may also include options for selecting IRs or Impulse Responses. IRs are essentially digital renderings of actual acoustic spaces that allow you to simulate what a signal would sound like in that room.
Next, you'll use the pre-delay and decay time controls to adjust the overall length of the reverb. Increasing the pre-delay adds a short delay between the direct signal and the early reflections, which helps listeners identify the instrument and prevents tracks from sounding washed out. If you want to add reverb to a track but don't want to push it too far back in the mix, turn up the pre-delay. The decay time controls the length of the reverb tail. Increase the decay time for a longer tail, or decrease it for a shorter tail.
Try to time it so the tail of your reverb becomes inaudible just before the next downbeat. Some reverbs also include additional controls for further shaping your sound, such as dedicated high-pass and low-pass filters, or diffusion controls, which controls how quickly the original signal transitions from early reflections to full reverberation.
I like to think of the diffusion knob as controlling how full the room is. With a packed house, it takes longer to hear reverb because everyones' bodies absorb the sound waves.
Now that you know how to control a reverb plug-in, let's take a look at some tips for using reverb in your mixes. Reverb is a powerful mixing tool that's great for adding depth and glue to your tracks. One of the most common uses of reverb is to control where each instrument is placed in the mix from front to back—almost like a pan control for depth.
We can use varying levels of reverb on different tracks to create the illusion of depth. When a sound is far away, it sounds more reverberant.
By adding more reverb to a track, you can push an instrument back in the mix. To achieve this effect, it's best to create a new aux track with one type of reverb and send each instrument to reverb bus at varying levels. Remember, it's not just about how much reverb a track has—you also have to consider how loud the direct signal is in the mix. If the dry signal is too high, it will sound like a loud instrument in a big room. By lowering the amount of the dry signal, you can push the instrument further back in the room and make it less prominent in the mix to make room for the lead instrument.
This approach is also a great way to make your mix feel more cohesive—like everything was recorded in the same space at the same time.
Some engineers like to use different reverb types for different groups of instruments. For instance, you might use a hall reverb on the drums and a short room or plate reverb on the vocal—or vice versa.
This approach can help create varying levels of depth, but can also make your mix sound uncontrolled like all of the tracks exist in their own space. Reverb can be used as ear candy to grab the listener's attention and help make a track stand out in the mix. This technique generally works best with slower songs that have enough space between each hit to hear the decay of a reverb tail. It also works great to help short sections like solos or fills stand out from the rest of the track.
Sometimes, it can be hard to fit reverb into a mix. Try rolling-off the lows and the highs to make the reverb sound less subtle, or boost the high-end to make it sparkle and stand out. So try to preview your reverb settings on both before settling on the perfect amount of reverb. Follow these tips on your next session to dial in professional-sounding mixes with deep, lush reverbs!
There's quite a bit of spill between instruments on the acoustic band's recording, for example, and I was happy with quite a natural ambient sound. With Magician's Nephew, on the other hand, there was no spill between any of the instruments except the live drum kit components, obviously , and I was happy to keep everything very dry and present, in line with the sonics of competing rock productions I was referencing.
So rather than feeling you need to count the number of reverb sends, it's much better to ask "what needs reverb in this mix? As for whether to send multiple tracks to a single reverb, there are some high-profile engineers who prefer to avoid that, but I can't say I've ever experienced a problem with it myself.
To return to the aforementioned acoustic band, the bulk of the reverbs used there were being fed from several instruments at once to aid with ensemble cohesion; whereas in the mix I did for Lingua Funqa in SOS June 's Mix Rescue column, most of my reverbs were used on just one or two instruments at a time, because I wanted to give each instrument its own sound within the context of a more chart-oriented 'confection', which is a lot less about realism, and more about attention-grabbing variety and contrast.
So, overall, I wouldn't get too hung up counting reverbs and sends.
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