Let's have a look at some ideas with automating a reverb plug-in
as you use it to do some sound design, and I'm
going to start with this little music excerpt here.
And right now we have just four tracks.
Just a little groove here.
Sounds like this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We have a pad.
A drumbeat.
[DRUMBEAT PLAYING]
A little bass part.
[BASS PLAYING]
And then a sort of a vox pad.
[VOX PAD PLAYING]
So when we think about automation and reverb, one of the things
we think about a lot, of course, is automating a send level,
and that's a pretty common thing to do in music mixing.
So the idea here, for example, is on this drumbeat
I have this send level automated going to Bus one,
and this goes to a reverb with a fairly straightforward reverb setup.
So let me solo this drumbeat, and this is without the reverb send.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And now I'm going to turn it on, and you'll
see this level change right here.
This is the automation.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So the idea is just on the backbeats we have a push in the send level,
and we drop just the snare strike to the reverb.
And again, it's a pretty straightforward reverb setup with a low diffusion.
So it's got a bit of grit to it.
We could smooth it out if we wanted to.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Like so.
This is the original.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But there's other things we can do with automating reverbs.
Here, for example, we have automation of a reverb that's actually
inserted on that pad track here.
This reverb here.
Now if I shut off this automation, it will just simply
play through this reverb here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And soloed.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Which could be a cool effect.
You can see it's a balance of dry and wet,
but the automation is a little more interesting here.
There's automation of a couple of things here.
Room size and also room density.
And so the idea here--
I'll put this back to volume.
The idea here is that we have both room size and the density
of the room modulated with the backbeat, and you can actually
see a little bit of automation here.
Especially you'll see with room size, this graphic will change.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This one has a bit of a pulse.
This was the original with no reverb.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Now it's got a bit of a pulse, and it kind of expands in size.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Now if you listen carefully, you can hear a little bit of crinkling.
A little bit of ticks and pops, and that's
because when you automate room size while it's passing audio,
it makes glitches in the audio.
And that actually can be kind of charming, kind of interesting.
You know, a little lo-fi kind of effect.
So it's something that we would expect.
Something that just happens with automating room size.
Here I'll go just to the early reflections.
We'll hear it a little more clearly.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And it's still pretty interesting.
And again, it just adds a little bit of motion to the sound,
and gets it to pulsate with the music a little bit.
Let's look at a couple of other examples here.
I've got a drumbeat here sending to Bus three, which is this reverb.
And on this reverb on this aux track here, we
have a number of parameters getting automated here,
Again, room size and the density of the room.
So it's a similar kind of idea.
But this time on a bus send to an aux track here.
So it sounds like this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Without the reverb.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Still a cool drumbeat, but this just adds a whole bunch of excitement to it.
And again, the way it changes in terms of the room size and also the density
here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Which just adds a little bit of energy to the drumbeat.
Here's another example.
We'll do some sound design examples here.
Here's a crash.
And again, just a couple of parameters is automated.
This time the reverb is on the track itself, and this is with no reverb.
[CRASHING SOUND]
Just the typical impact sound here.
But now we have automation of a couple of parameters here.
So reverb time, density and diffusion.
And again, you'll see that graphically, you'll see the parameters change.
[CRASHING SOUND]
But the idea, it starts off very dense, and then both density and diffusion
decrease, and then the reverb time tightens up as well.
And the end of it, instead of being a diffuse tail,
it's more of a hard sputter.
[CRASHING SOUND]
Or maybe without the automation.
[CRASHING SOUND]
You know, it's your standard continuous tail,
and that can also be an interesting sound design idea.
But here what's interesting is the way it decays into something less expected.
[CRASHING SOUND]
Last example.
Way out here I've got another sound design element.
This is a motor of some sort that's coming to a stop.
So right now, without any reverb it sounds like this.
[STOPPING SOUND]
Kind of cool sound to begin with.
And then here with some automation.
I'll turn on the reverb, and you can see we have, once again,
a number of automated parameters, including
the spread of the reverb tail.
The reverb time itself.
The low ratio comes up and the diffusion decreases.
And again, it's just going to create a different sound.
You'll see these parameters change in the movie.
[STOPPING SOUND]
And what's interesting is that when the spread decreases,
remember it just creates a bit of like a resonator kind of effect.
And the idea here is that as the spread decreases,
it goes from being a diffuse reverb tail to that kind of resonator effect,
and it feels like a spring of some sort.
[STOPPING SOUND]
Very different kind of sound there, and an interesting sound design element.
So these are just some of the many, many, many things
you could try automating actual reverb parameters
in a reverb like PlatinumVerb.