Reverb, how to choose, how much, etc..?

noah shain had a bunch of specific info, a few things that stuck out as items that I found helped me. I'll admit however this is something I still puzzle over and struggle with to do what I want and get sounds like what I hear from other people.

First was EQ. Once I figured out I could heavily EQ my returns I started to make more progress. With EQ I'm able to get the reverb to disappear a bit more and become more of a pillow than a rock canyon. The other EQ trick noah mentioned is to EQ/filter the source and let the reverb run full spectrum. Depends on the sound you are after. But I was much happier with my reverbs when I started doing simple things to them with EQ. I tend to roll off quite a bit of lows and highs if I want something to just form a bit of room around the vocal and not actually stick out as a reverb.

I also tend to layer two or three reverbs. I nearly always run a plate on the vocal. Unless I'm going for a very live plate sound I typically use the plate to thicken things a bit. Usually you can't really hear it much but it adds some tone and weight. Next I'll pick a room, I lean toward small to medium room sizes, but obviously if I want a vocal in a giant space that can change. I'll use the room to help set the environment. I'll tend to also send a few key melody elements (usually acoustic guitars, upright bass in what I'm doing) to this same room. I tend to EQ both the plate and the room a bit - dropping low end and depending if I want light or dark I'll be heavy handed on the highs as well. I'll also layer a hall into this mixture as well occasionally.

As for level of all of this - that is to taste. Typically if I don't want to hate it later I'll do the bring it up until I can hear it and then drop it back a bit trick. I'll also put on some headphones and listen. For me I hear reverb better in the headphones, so I typically use them to help set my levels at the start and then quickly switch to my monitors once I've established my rough baseline of what I know is not too loud. Using other references (car, friends stereo...) is another way to check your levels. If you do that enough you quickly get the hang of what is too much and what is just right at least to your own personal preference. If you are trying to sound match some other recording then I'll bring that up and listen, and compare my results, usually I do that by just focusing on one small section of a piece.

I'll also skip through presets and find something close and tweak it from there to make it work. However I have spent considerable time messing around with a few reverb plugin's trying to wrap my head around what is going on with all the controls. For me the plugin that seemed to click was the Exponential Audio stuff. I like and use both R2 and Phoenix quite a bit. I like their sounds, and I like the UI. I especially enjoy messing around with the early reflections, and to be able to visually see the representation just clicked in my head for some reason.

Now Delays - man I struggle with them and I know many people use them all the time and they do it very well. noah had quite the list of delays in his post. I struggle with anything past the odd slap. ;-)

I would really like to learn how those guys I named above make it sound like the dynamic range on every instrument has like 3db. Seriously, it's like even tho a drum fill might be performed super quiet (like brushes playing a cymbal roll), it's just as loud coming out of the speakers as another phrase that was played FFF by the drums. How do they do that? It's definitely not compression because it sounds like they just set the levels for each musical phrase (not each track) so they sit between -3 and -6 on an RMS meter or something... I don't know... I can't figure it out, but I want to know how they do it.

can you explain this a bit? i don't quite understand what you mean by "it sound like the dynamic range on every instrument has like 3db." 

Yep, if the room sounds good, there is no need in some situations.


I doubt there was any reverb on most Sinatra recordings in the 40's and 50's. I don't know about the sixties. My guess is they'd have used a plate then.

I have had various friends work there over the years. I've taken some stuff (vocals and strings) over there and recorded the chambers a couple times. They're really nice. On strings they're pretty gorgeous...and familiar.