Reverb/recording guitars

[Nekrosis]

Hey everyone, this is my first thread so go easy on me.

I've been messing around with home recordings for a few years, but never got really serious about having a decent sound, since most of what I recorded was just a way of documenting song ideas.

Now I'm working on setting myself to record a good guitar sound, so far I've been pulling some decent tone out of amplitube.

I'm currently using EZdrummer/Drumkit From Hell with amplitube, usually recording 3-6 guitar tracks with lots of guitar harmonies hard panned, as well as the rythm.

My question is, how should I handle reverb? Should it be applied to every track individually, or to the stereo out?

Also, I do have a decent tube amp. I'm planning on getting 2 SM 57's and tossing them on the center and outer ring of the speaker, then blending the sounds later on.
My mixer has preamp on all mic inputs. Do I need to get a seperate preamp for the SM 57's?

 

[noisewreck]

Hey everyone, this is my first thread so go easy on me.

I've been messing around with home recordings for a few years, but never got really serious about having a decent sound, since most of what I recorded was just a way of documenting song ideas.

Now I'm working on setting myself to record a good guitar sound, so far I've been pulling some decent tone out of amplitube.

I'm currently using EZdrummer/Drumkit From Hell with amplitube, usually recording 3-6 guitar tracks with lots of guitar harmonies hard panned, as well as the rythm.

My question is, how should I handle reverb? Should it be applied to every track individually, or to the stereo out?

Also, I do have a decent tube amp. I'm planning on getting 2 SM 57's and tossing them on the center and outer ring of the speaker, then blending the sounds later on.
My mixer has preamp on all mic inputs. Do I need to get a seperate preamp for the SM 57's?

Reverb and delay are normally some of those FX that you want to set up as a send and then send various amounts of different tracks to them. This has the following advantages:
1. Saves you processing power (in case of plugins)
2. Allows the effect to be applied to more than one track (in case of hardware and plugins)
3. Gives you a cohesive "soundstage" by allowing you to apply the same "acoustic space" to all instruments.

So, you setup one reverb, and then you send various amounts from different tracks to it. Some instruments would be sent less, if they need to be in the front, and others might be sent more, if they need to sit further in the back.

Once you get your head around this, you'll start discovering that you can setup several reverb/delay send track combinations and then send various instruments in different amounts to those for specific purposes.

There are some very few instances where you'd apply reverb or delay as an insert on the track. The obvious one would be if the effect was only going to be used by that one track, and/or you needed to further process the resulting sound as a whole (example you'd want to apply filtering or compress them together, or whatever).

Good luck.

 

[The Cancers]

No on the separate preamps.

As far as the reverb goes, that's a bigger question than an either or decision.
It really all depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish with the reverb.

When you know what you're trying to accomplish with it, you have just limitless possibilities of what you want the particular reverb you use to sound like.

As a general rule, though, unless you are trying to use the reverb as an obvious effect (as opposed to using it to create a soundstage/give spacial clues to the listener), you don't want to use too many different reverbs/settings in one mix, as the sound of some guitars in this room, some in this hall, others going through a plate, will end up undoing the work of creating the illusion of the instruments playing in a particular space.

Mixing Audio by Roey Izhaki is a book that has a great section on reverb, cleared up a lot of uncertainties I had about what exactly it's for and how to go about using it.

 

[Nekrosis]

Hmm, no seperate preamps on the 57's...phew!

I know the possibilities with reverb are practically limitless, which is actually my biggest problem. I usually don't have a specific idea of 'I want to sound like so-and-so band", rather, I tend to mess around and see what sounds good to me at the time.
Reverb is a little overwhelming in that I can never seem to get it right heh

So far I've been applying all my effects as inserts on each track, such as EQ and compression...I was wondering why I was running out of processing power...I guess this answers it

I'm using cubase for all my stuff, and I'm not entirely sure how to set up an effects channel correctly (I know, I'm a total n00b).
I've got lots of experience with tracking and the techniques (I've done a lot of live stuff, recorded in pro studios several times) but mixing is something I've never really touched before.

EDIT: I realize my wording on the preamps question wasn't extremely clear; I meant preamps seperate from the mixer, not a seperate one for each mic

 

[The Cancers]

Yeah, the mixer preamps are fine.

And I wasn't talking about sounding like this or that band, so much as deciding
a) do I want this reverb to sound like an effect? Spring reverb on a guitar, plate reverb on a voice or snare, these sorts of things aren't really very good at giving spacial clues - they don't make the instrument sound like it's in a particular place - but they are often pleasing to the ear,
or
b) do I want the reverb to contribute to the sense the listener is getting of the instruments being in a particular place? Reverbs used in this context are often going to be a lot less present than effect reverbs. They aren't meant to be heard right up front, so much as to subtly give you information on how far away a certain instrument is from you. And, whereas the effect reverbs are usually gonna be inserts, these sorts of reverbs you want to use as sends (or, if you use them as inserts, you don't want to use wildly different ones on different instruments in one mix - then it ends up sounding like this guitar is maybe five or six feet away in one room and these maracas are maybe 12 feet away in an entirely different room - but since both rooms are coming from right in front of you, it becomes a sort of physical impossibility that your brain can't decode as giving a realistic sense of hearing instruments in a realistic space), generally sending more of an instrument you want to sound further away to the reverb.

See, a lot of the tracks you end up with in a home recording situation are by necessity DI or recorded by a close mic. But you never in a real live music situation have your ear right next to every sound source on stage (it'd be impossible, as well as uncomfortable). The reverb is there to inject that sense of space back into the recording.
So you need to try and pick a reverb that gives you the feel of the space you're going for in a certain mix and just play around with relative levels of dry signal volume versus amount of dry signal sent to the reverb until you start to get the hang of it.

It takes a lot of hands on experimentation, but the first step is getting that understanding of the different purposes a reverb might serve in the mix.

As far as applying different effects as inserts on different tracks - eq and compression at least - you're generally on the right track there. EQ is very often corrective - either you're trying to remove ugly noise from some track or just trying to clear some room in the frequency spectrum - and so you want it on individual tracks. There are situations where eq-ing things together works - a big wall of distorted guitars, for example, can benefit from a group eq, but a global eq send is not as often a good idea as it is with reverb. Same goes for compression.

Maybe a better rule of thumb is just to start out using sends on things you want to glue together in some way, and use inserts on things you want to affect individually.

And I think I just typed so much because I really just wanted to use this new emoticon.

Bad babbling bastard. Bad!

 

[Nekrosis]

Heh, don't worry about the 'babbling', the information and perspective is quite appreciated.


Thanks for the info!