A short conversation about reverb
I was talking with a mentee tonight about reverb; I’m reproducing that conversation here because it will probably be illuminating to someone else!
Does the way the reverb is routed make any sort of difference in how it sounds?
For sure it can, particularly if one routing would hit compression or saturation and another wouldn't.
For example, on my starting vocal bussing setup, everything goes through my vocal master, and there is a saturator on there that acts like an everything-to-everything ducker. So the vocal will push the reverb out of the way when it's in, and then it'll be louder in the spaces between the vocals, all in a really seamless way.
In general this works great for a lot of what I work on. But for songs where I don't want the reverb interacting with the vocal in that way, but instead want a smooth and consistent reverb cloud, I will change the routing on the reverb to have it go directly to the master bus, thereby bypassing that saturator and the dynamics interactions it causes.
Do you use any sort of sidechain on the reverbs?
As noted above, my vocal master bus processing does a form of sidechaining, where everything pushes everything else out of the way; the loudest sound wins! Some modern reverbs have ducking built in; or you can always roll your own with a compressor and a routing bus. The question this would answer is: is the reverb getting in something’s way? If so, either sidechain the reverb to that thing (or just turn the reverb down a bit or/and focus its panning much more narrowly).
Any specific frequencies to know about?
I tend to roll both lows and highs off my reverbs, and focus them on the specific part of the midrange that does what I'm looking for. I just use a simple 12 db/oct hpf and lpf to do this; also, lots of reverbs have built-in hpf/lpf filters.
When I started, I used to throw a reverb on every sound, so I'm not sure how these techniques fit into the larger mixes I’ve been working on lately.
I still do throw a reverb on lots of sounds 🤣 But, like subtly! Really short reverbs are great for some things. Making the reverb be nearly mono, like maybe only 10% wide, and centering the pan under the sound it's coming from is also a great way to put lots of sounds in specific spaces without everything sitting on top of everything else in a soupy, undifferentiated mess.
It’s many delays — jamie