Does it need to take up more space?

I’m thinking about space a lot this week. Not as in the final frontier … as in the dimensionality in a recording.

I alluded to this idea in yesterday’s post, but I want to expand on it, with a question for you: could something that you’re working on be better served if an element or elements took up (or created) significantly more space?

This is a reverb question, really. And it’s sort of a more “advanced topics” reverb thought, I guess?

When I think of where my thoughts about reverb started, it was in what I would now consider a much more “basic” idea of what reverb can be. An environment for vocals, mostly. But even in that, I think my thinking was fairly limited — I would put a reverb on the vocal, get a sound fairly quickly that I liked well enough, and move on. My reverb pans would be at the default < 100 100 > width, and I probably wasn’t doing any EQing on the send pre or post the reverb. Like I said: basica reverb usage.

But my understanding has changed and grown. These days, I think of reverb not so much as an effect, but as more of a tool for creating environments — with a focus on the feelings you can create in and with those environments.

Here are a couple of thoughts to get you thinking more about the role reverb can play in a song:

• Long, dark reverbs can create a serious / intentional space for a vocal — and this can create an opportunity to keep your music bed much more minimal. Check out the old Post Malone song “Congratulations” for an excellent example of this. That arrangement is basically drums, a drifty synth, and vocal reverb. So emotional!
  
  You will probably want to EQ the lows and highs off your reverb fairly dramatically for this to work without creating mud and conflict.

• Short, splashy reverbs can create a polyrhythmic ricochet effect that can add significant propulsion and drive to a song; particularly if it pushes out to the sides. When I’m designing a texture like this, sometimes I like to use bx_digital to explode the reverb’s stereo width out to 180% or so, but then narrow the track width to somewhere around 50% — this creates a pronounced “hyper-stereo” rhythmic reverb effect that’s still highly mono-compatible.
  
  Sometimes adding a little low shelving EQ to the reverb can increase the perceived impact of the sound it’s on, while still leaving the sound itself clean.

• A dense, spacious reverb on a melodic sound can help that sound speak in a much more commanding and emotional way.

• You can use the “take up more space” approach to help a sound take up less space, too! If you make a sound mono, and push it into a mono reverb sitting directly behind the sound in a specific place in the left-right panorama, you can set it further back in the soundstage. This can help the sound find a space to speak clearly without existing in a conflicting way at the same level of the song as, say, the vocal.

Space is the place — jamie