Break your reverb up into component parts

Here’s a great trick for getting more control over your reverb: break it up into component parts!

I routinely have three different reverb aux returns on my lead vocal, all fed from the same single aux send:

• An “early reflections” reverb. This is the short burst of “sshhh” at the beginning of the reverb sound. Depending how I want it to integrate with the rest of the reverb sound, this will have between a 0.7 and 2 second decay. It’s often a plate or a room or something with a similarly quick onset.

• A “main” reverb. This is mostly what you hear as being “the” reverb sound. The excellent thing about pairing the main reverb with the early reflections reverb is that you don’t have to worry so much about getting that initial definitional bloom out of the main reverb! So you can optimize the diffusion, density, size, and length for the body of the reverb. This is typically between 3 and 5 seconds’ decay time.

• A “tail” reverb. This is usually somewhat longer, and filtered down on the high and low end with either LPF/HPF or low and high shelving EQs. This lingers a bit after the main reverb has died away — I’ll usually have it set somewhere in the 5-7 seconds range, depending on the tempo of the song and how much space there is to play with in the vocal delivery.

Bonus level: nest the pans on these different returns. < 30% 30%> for the early reflections, < 50% 50% > for the main reverb, and < 80% 80% > for the tail can produce a lovely result on a vocal. Experiment!

Architecturally — jamie