How would one go about making a nice sounding chamber pop/rock mix? I'm talking like the Phil Spector sound where it's a wall of reverb and very distant sounding, but maybe a more modern take on it.
Can you post some specific examples?
1. Do you put heavy reverb on each instrument? If so, what type of reverb? Hall/Plate or a room?
or
2. Do you put heavy reverb on the entire mix? Again, which type would you use?
You put anything on everything, chase it with delays, filter pre and post to the reverb send, in addition to widening verbs, moding verbs, and delaying the tails of verbs. You can also use single or multi band distortions or saturators to get the thicker more etherial atmospheric reverbs. Also you can run octave shifters infront of reverbs to get the shimmer you'd see Edge using or the kind of junk they do in real modern church music.
I experimented with it a bit and found that a hall or plate reverb on the entire mix sounds more authentic.
But I'm wondering if anyone knows "proper" technique or what the pros do just so I can try that out as well.
Thanks!
Pro producers track in rooms and spaces specific to what they're looking for as it goes into the mix stage. I'm very well acquainted with most state of the art tracking rooms in my region. We also use analog plates, which are really cool, but out of the price range of most home studio guys. And they're enormously clunky, not portable, and noisy. You'll also see pro guys mixing with Bricastis, Lexicon 980's, and obscure odd and end stuff. But once again, those can run $10-20K. Another trick we do is send the verb mix though a pair of midfields (or even PA speakers) into the live room to capture the ambience of room. Sort of like reamping, just with a natural reverb sound instead of a guitar amp.
To answer your second question, yes, you often do bus multiple groups of verbs to through an aux send. But in parallel of course. Though I think its rare these days to see it placed on a 2 bus. Sometimes you see it used on the 2 bus in a mastering context. But not often.
If you're wanting to start with the basics, you need to know how to time your reverbs. You also need to know the different components of the reverbs, how to time your early reflections and your verb pre-delays. Make sure you understand how the pre and post processing affects the reverbs as well. For instance, if you compress the outgoing signal on a reverb tail, you'll get a completely different sound than you will if you compress a snare drum then send it to a reverb.
There's really a lot that needs to be learned about just how to process the tails. Like...try sticking a stereo mod effect on a tail, then detune the left and the right tails by +5 and -5 semitones. You're really only gonna get learn your way around these by experimenting.
I own just about all of the major reverb plugins. Waves Abbey Road, UAD EMT's, Phoenix Verb, Altiverb, Lexicon, Redline, Softube Tsar, PSP...those are all good reverbs to start with.
