Mixing with reverb is a fundamental skill to learn when you're first starting out.
Today, I'm going to explain what reverb is
in music production, what all the parameters do and which two
are the ones you really need to focus on right now.
Hi, I'm Sara Carter from simply mixing .com, where each week I bring you simple,
practical advice to help you get better at mixing.
Reverb is probably the most popular effect to use in mixing.
Too much reverb will ruin a mix and is a telltale giveaway of an amateur mix.
So when starting out,
my advice is to mostly use shorter reverbs and use them in a considered way,
tastefully, so that they subtly enhance the mix and not overpower it.
Reverb is used to put a vocal or
instrument into a space to give it a sense of realism
and to create a more natural feel, putting some air around the sound.
Using reverb in music is something that seems straightforward on the face
of it, but once you start to use it, you might be surprised to find how quickly
your mix starts to lose definition and turns muddy.
I mix mostly rock and indie music and I don't use that much reverb at all.
And when I do, it's always considered and I go about it with a light touch
and use shorter reverb times so as not to lose definition and muddy up my mixes.
Reverb makes just about anything sound instantly better.
So the temptation is to add it to everything at first, but don't.
This is the number one mistake people make when starting out in music production.
In life,
when we hear reverb, we're actually hearing the reflection
and scattering of many multiple sound waves bouncing off all the surfaces
in a room or space following the initial sound itself.
And it can remain present long after the initial sound has stopped.
Reverb pushes a sound back in the mix,
making it sound softer, rounder and farther away.
It's one of those tools we use to build
the 3D ness of a mix and create depth, width and height.
Just think about a vocal reflecting off
a tiled wall versus a living room wall, for example.
The reverb reflected from a tiled surface
will sound brighter, and this can help to create the illusion of height.
Let me show you.
How here I've got some drums that have got no effects on them at all.
So let's have a listen to that dry, first of all.
OK, and then with a small room reverb.
It's just quite a subtle ambience there
that's been used to play the drums in a natural sounding room.
Let me play again and I'll start with the reverb on and then I'll bypass it.
So you can hear how the drums sound much closer to you and they sound a little
bit more defined because the edges haven't been blurred with the reverb.
Now, this is just a small room and it's
fairly typical to use a small room on drums.
But what about that tiled room?
How does that sound?
Have a listen to this and think about the qualities of the reflections
themselves and how they're different to each other.
So it sounds much different.
Let me switch between the two and you can
hear that the tiles are giving the reverb more high frequency content and more zing
and there's more sort of height to the sound.
Take a listen and I'll switch between the two.
We can change the characteristics of a particular reverb with the parameters
in a plugin to control its size, shape and texture.
To understand how this works, let's take a look at the different phases
reverb goes through as it develops and eventually disappears.
Reverb can be divided into different phases of development.
First, we've got the direct sound,
followed by the early reflections and then reverberation.
Being able to separate your thinking about reverb into these three different areas
can be really helpful as you learn to use reverb in your mixes.
You'll see there's also pre delay here
and I'll get to that in more detail later in the video.
The direct sound is the sound going
straight to your ears without bouncing off any surfaces.
And this is followed by the early reflections.
These give you the impression of the size
and type of space the source is in and this is where the sustain begins
to develop across your track, leading then into the late reflections.
Confusingly, these are known by various names such as reverberation,
reverb tail and reverberant sound, and they're a dense collection
of reflections that have been bounced around many surfaces.
There are millions of these reflections
that we perceive as a single sound which initially builds up and then decays.
We're able to control aspects of each one
of these sections using the reverb parameters.
The first control and one of the most important, in my opinion, is decay.
Simply put, this is the length of the reverb from start to finish.
Bigger rooms will have a longer reverb tail.
Smaller rooms will have a shorter reverb tail.
This is the main parameter you'll use
to set a suitable reverb length for your track.
Long reverb, sound, lush,
dreamy and ethereal and push sound way back into the mix.
Short reverbs will be more of a small room space or ambience that takes the dryness
away from a close miked recording, giving the impression of realism.
Let me show you what I mean.
Take a listen to this vocal.
See what reverb can do to enhance the dry sound.
So you can hear how this particular reverb
is making the vocal sound lush and ethereal.
Let's have a go at making this vocal sound a little less ethereal.
OK, so it's the same reverb with the same
settings, I'm just using a little bit less of it.
When you're working with tracks,
oftentimes because of that close miking technique that we use all the time.
The track is very, very dry.
And that's great from a creative standpoint, because it means we can really
go to town and create any kind of ambience or reverberant space that we want.
What I've got here is I've got a guitar.
Sounds like it's probably a DI.
And so therefore it's really, really very dry indeed.
So take a listen to it and then let me
explain what I like to do to DI instruments.
Yeah, that's really very dry, but that's great because that means it's
a blank canvas for us to do what we like to it with reverb.
Now I like to do with DI'd guitars in particular is I just like to put them
in a room, a small room, just to make it sound as though they've
actually been recorded with a guitar cab and a microphone in front of them.
So this is the reverb I tend to use to achieve that.
So let me play it muted and then I'll bring it in.
And oftentimes when you press stop,
that is the best place and the best way to actually hear what the reverbs doing
and what it's doing in this case is I've used a very small kind of space.
It's only 560 milliseconds, which equates to quite a small room indeed
and that translates into what we've just heard.
Have a listen again and listen to the quality of the reverb and see if
you can imagine the size of the room that the guitar cab may have been placed into.
OK.
Really, really quite small, but it's enough to add that realism
and it's giving that sense that this guitar has actually been
recorded in a recording studio, whereas in reality we know it hasn't.
Next, in order of importance is pre-delay.
Pre-delay is used to introduce a gap between the dry signal and the reverb.
It's the delayed time between the end of the initial sound and the beginning
of the first reflections, and it's brilliant for preventing
the reverb from overwhelming the dry signal and loss of clarity.
It's an important and powerful parameter
that allows you to control the perceived size of a space or depth of an instrument
in the sound stage and also in maintaining clarity.
More pre-delay makes the space sound bigger because you're increasing the time
it takes for the first reflections to reach your ears.
Now this is mimicking the natural sound of a large space.
Typical settings for a pre-delay is anything from 10 to 30 milliseconds,
and roughly represent what you find happening audibly in a real space.
Reverb
Time is longer the bass frequencies than it is for mid range and high frequencies.
And this is where EQ damping comes in.
By adjusting the high frequency damping
inside a reverb plug in, you're actually changing the character
of the reverb itself as it's generated because it affects the reverb decay time
of that frequency band and not just the tone.
High and low pass filters are another EQ control you find in reverb plugins.
You use these in the same way you'd use an external EQ either before or after
your plugin to control the low and high frequencies generated by the reverb.
Use the high pass filter to prevent low
frequency build-up, which can result in a muddy sounding
reverb tail and take up lots of space at the bottom end of your mix.
Diffusion or density refers to the texture and thickness of the reverb tail.
Think of them as controlling the number of reflections and the more reflections
there are, the thicker or denser the reverb will seem.
Along with the EQ damping, they let you shape the tone of the reverb.
Now, this might be a tricky one to hear, but let me demo this one for you.
Let's go back to that vocal recording
which I demonstrated earlier with a really lush, long sounding reverb.
I've changed the reverb out here just
to demonstrate the density and what it does to the sound of the reverb.
And what we're doing is just listening to the reverb return.
So I'm using the reverb plugin by Pro tools, comes free with Pro tools,
and you can see the density control is
underneath the room section here in the middle of the plugin.
At the moment it's set to zero percent and this is what the reverb sounds like.
You can hear that sounds quite bright, zingy.
So let's hear what happens when we really dial up the density to 100 percent
and thicken up the sound of those reverb tails.
You can hear how much thicker and duller that reverb sounds.
Let me do it again for you.
This time, I'll go quickly between zero and 100 percent.
So now you know what all the controls do, but which ones should you pay the most
attention to to get the most control when you're mixing with reverb?
Well, to me, it's the decay or the reverb time and pre-delay.
A very close third would be the EQ filters
to roll off some of those powerful lower frequencies and prevent muddy build up.
Reach for the decay control to dial
in the length of the reverb so that it's not too long, and then try short pre-delay
to separate the reverb from the dry signal and keep it more focussed.
Now this is a great way to stop the reverb crowding a lead vocal or the snare drum.
Mixing with reverb is often something
newer mixers stumble blindly into depending solely on plug in presets
to create the ambience they're looking for.
So I hope this video has inspired you
to create reverb from scratch, or has given you the knowledge to be able
to change the parameters inside a preset to better fit your mix.
The amount of reverb you use really depends on the style of music you're
mixing and the type of reverb you decide to use.
Now, if you'd like me to create a video about the different types and flavours
of reverb, then drop a comment below to let me know.
Now, one last important point.
Reverb sounds quite different on headphones compared to speakers.
So if you mix in headphones,
always try to check your mix on a pair of speakers if you can,
and try to find a happy medium that works best for the two.
Now you've got a good grounding in the basics of reverb
check out my soon to be released EQ Essentials course.
In it, you'll learn everything you need to know to begin using EQ like a pro.
So click the link below.
Sign up and I'll see you in the next video.