chessrock said:
On the other hand, if you compress before you add the verb, it isn't going to sound as natural. Reason being that when dealing with natural room ambience, it always goes: room ambience > then compression.
Think about it.
You get where I'm coming from? I'll re-phrase: When dealing with a situation where you're using real, genuine room ambience ... the "room" always comes before the compression. There's no other way it could occur in the natural world.
I guess where I'm getting at is that, if you want it to sound natural, then use the reverb first ...
but make sure to use less of it than you might otherwise like.
Chess, you are absolutely correct in the analysis that *by definition*, the room has to come before compression. But - far be it for me to disagree with another Chicagoan on anything other than baseball teams
- stretching that natural situation to how to effect a dry recording is not always true, IMHO. A couple of examples...
Say you're recording bass direct. If you verb it before pressing it, there's a better than even chance of over-accentuating the verb. If you do it's going to sound like molasses. In that kind of case, the reason for the compression is to even out the instrument level; i.e. to make the instrument "play differently". Once you have it playing like a theoretically perfect bass,
then you inject it into the room by adding verb to it. The effect is to have a perfect sounding bass playing in a room rather than trying to get a bass playing in a room to sound perfect.
Also, lets say you've gone into the mixdown polishing stage and you need to either; a) add a little reverb to the overall mix to glue the tracks together, or b) add a reverb tail at to the hard edit at the end of the song, or c) both of the above. In each of those cases, if you apply the verb ebfore the compression, you have the same problem you had with the bass situation above, the decay of the reverb can be artificially enhanced by the compression and you'll sound like you're in an oil drum. Like the bass situation, these situations are cases where you need to get the right sound first, and then apply the verb to it to give it that ambience and not vice versa.
This same situation can apply to drums if there's a lot of close miking and very little "room" in the recording. In that case, you need to make it sound like a good drum kit in a natural room. So you need to get the good drum kit sound (with compression) first, then put it in the room with some verb. if you go the other way, verbing it first, as you said yourself, you have the compression boosting the reverb and it won't sound right.
If, of course, you're not close miking or have a heavy dose of overheads with a lot of the room in them, then you're right, you already have the room to deal with before you apply anything, so verb is already there by definition.
Does that make any sense?
G.
