Making mix sound like its in same room (REVERB!)

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lurgan liar

lurgan liar

Jimmy Page XXVIII
Ok I am looking some advice on making a mix sound like it has been recorded in the same room...

The mix consists of drums (kick, snare, Left and Right overhead), Bass guitar, electric rythmn guitar, acoustic guitar, lead vox and backing vox...

So far i have got everything to sound nice in the mix. I firstly set all faders to unity gain then set the volumes accordingly, i eq'ed basically every track .... then i compressed the vocals and began to compress everything else around that .... .......i subbgrouped the drums, the vocals, and the guitars ......

However i am having dificulty finding the right kind of reverb of or combination of reverbs to make all the elemnts of the mix blend togther ...

I have the following Reverb Plugins... Waves Trueverb, Sonitus Reverb, Ambience, Perfect Space Convolution Reverb... and a few others...

Can anyone offer any advice on "Sends" ...or else setting up stereo reverbs on all the stereo busses???

Thanks :)
 
Hey man...what I do is send everything on a bus to one verb...say perfect space, bus 1. Adjust the send level to suit...and maybe set the eq to lower the lows...they seem to build pretty fast.

Just a thought....... :D
 
Not sure if you have anything DI'd or not. Like bass guitar or keys, etc. ? Yes? No?

If so, then make sure to apply even more reverb to those tracks. And tweak with it; specifically, mess with the pre-delay a little ... until you can get that to sound like it's being played in a room. This can be tricky with DI'd stuff, so you may even want to try some sort of amp simulator.

Yea, yea, normally I don't advocate such a thing, but in extreme circumstances, if you can add just a little bit of fuzz to something, it sounds more like it's being played out of a speaker.

Dogman's got some good stuff, there, too. And I'm not talking about his avatar, either. Alright, yea I am (refering to his avatar).
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RAMI said:
Were they not recorded in the same room?
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Drums, acoustic guitar and electric guitar were recorded in one room,

the bass guitar was DI'ed, and the vocals were recorded in a different room...

so basically i should send a bit of everything to one verb ... add more verb on the bass guitar as it was di'ed and just simply tweak the sends to taste ..then eq the lows out of the reverb ...???
 
lurgan liar said:
so basically i should send a bit of everything to one verb ... add more verb on the bass guitar as it was di'ed and just simply tweak the sends to taste ..then eq the lows out of the reverb ...???
Click to expand...

yes especially if you are adding more verb to the bass, that could be a muddy mess without a low cut on the verb.

Also watch the panning on the drums, if it's too wide it will be more obvious that it's really a "production" rather than a "recording". :)
 
A couple of points..
lurgan liar said:
Drums, acoustic guitar and electric guitar were recorded in one room,
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Is their room's tone on their tracks? This could set a major constant in the sound stage you're building, or play a part in combination with reverb you're adding. If the room tone is significant, drums in particular may have this, it sets a level of depth (stage-back) for them.

Even though you may be going for realistic, some instruments may still like tailored patches. I.e., percussion may want brighter, or more density for example than vocals, etc.

so basically i should send a bit of everything to one verb ... add more verb on the bass guitar as it was di'ed and just simply tweak the sends to taste ..then eq the lows out of the reverb ...???
Click to expand...
The case I'm making is that you still may want to consider the front-back layers (some closer' which means dryer and/or less close reflections than the back layers), and possibly more than one verb.
That might be a way through when (if ;) ) 'everything is in the same room' but it still not quite happening right. :D
Wayne
 
you could also try kickin' the bass and vox thru a monitor out into the room you recorded everything else in and mic the room up...use that as your reverb...

Happy friday!

Mike
 
bigtoe said:
you could also try kickin' the bass and vox thru a monitor out into the room you recorded everything else in and mic the room up...use that as your reverb...

Happy friday!

Mike
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That is a great idea man!!

Would not be too keen to add reverb to bass on its own, find that bass finds its way in the mix without any reverb as it usually sits next to other sounds wich may have a little reverb. Adding reverb to bass could indeed muddy things up.

On the whole I like to play with the room, and try to get the roomsound through the PA monitors, not easy, you need to listen a lot, and get to know the roomsound.

Overal it is always a challenge to get the PA monitors to sound like the room, and each room sounds so different, just experiment a lot to get confortable with the sound and your set-up possibilities, I would be careful with adding effects and work more with mikeplacement, but that is just me I guess since I do not really use digitial equipment here.
 
I've not found plugin reverbs to be very realistic, so that may be part of the problem.

In particular, I find early reflections to be where you most effectively tailor reverb to match the acoustic space, but early reflections are where plugins reverbs are weakest (in my opinion). What you might try doing is use whichever reverb has the best and most programmable early reflections, and get those close. Use only the early reflections on that reverb. Then follow it up with a different reverb that is the best for overall reverb tone and use that only for the reverb tail portion, no early reflections on the reverb second in the chain.

The point where you start is to first create a reverb that sounds exactly like the room. So it will probably be pretty short and match the room tone. You'll probably have to eq it for that. Once you've matched the reverb to the room, then you can extend the reverb times a little bit to create the sense of a bit more space.

You may be adding too much reverb, which will clearly not match the acoustic recording. So start by matching the room reverb as closely as possible and then work from there.
 
We do a radio boradcast of our church and once and a while our pastor will record his sermon in a room instead of live in the auditorium. What I'll do is play his recording back on the house system in the auditorium and record throuhg house mics to get genuin reverb like on a normal sunday and mix that in with his dry recording. Seamless (minus people caughing ;))
 
SamIam89 said:
We do a radio boradcast of our church and once and a while our pastor will record his sermon in a room instead of live in the auditorium. What I'll do is play his recording back on the house system in the auditorium and record throuhg house mics to get genuin reverb like on a normal sunday and mix that in with his dry recording. Seamless (minus people caughing ;))
Click to expand...

Yep like that idea as well!!

Great stuff :)
 
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