In praise of short reverbs

I see a sort of binary thinking sometimes in beginning producers, in which reverb seems to be either “no” or “huge.” Without a lot in between!

So I just wanted to encourage you today that you can take the idea of reverb into much subtler spaces. Reverb, in its essence, is a tool for putting a sound in a space. And those spaces can come in all shapes and sizes!

A small amount of an extremely short reverb can be the difference between a static, annoying kick drum and an interesting, contextualized kick drum. I’m talking like 0.2 second decay times here.

Usually I roll all the high end off (12 dB/oct LPF at ~2,900 Hz or so), so the beater isn’t pushing any of the air, just the body of the drum. The idea is that you don’t want it to sound like reverb so much as you want it just to have a little space around it.

A short reverb on a synth bass can make it so you don’t need another synthesizer sound to take up space in the midrange. This would be maybe like a 0.5 second decay time.

A short reverb on a percussive keyboard sound can help it breathe with the music. Try using predelay for this. Perhaps timed to the song!

A short reverb on a percussion bed can bring it to life and glue it perceptually to the rest of the sounds in the mix.

The list goes on, but you get the idea. I’ll often have a different short reverb on a bunch of different tracks in a mix — with the pans nested so I’m not using the same width on everything.

Spaciously — jamie