I make a point to listen everywhere I go.
I like warm sounding rooms. I try to emulate those rooms when setting up a reverb. Most music produced in the last 5 years does not use those phony plate reverbs. They have a place in music, just not a predominate one.
Room reverbs will serve you well. Chamber reverbs will serve you well. Use medium to small rooms and chambers for medium to up tempo stuff. Use big rooms and chambers for slower stuff.
Three settings on a reverb that will make all the difference:
1) Pre-delay: This will allow the original signal to develop before the onset of reverb. There are times where you want to wash out the original sound, and will not have very much pre-delay at all, but not very often.
2) Hi-Cut Filters: This will mellow out the reverb and make it sound like real rooms you will be in. Seldom do I have this set above 4KHz. You just don’t normally need reverb content above 4KHz.
3) Diffusion: Lower setting creates reverbs that are more distinct. If you want a subtle reverb that is not very noticeable, raise the value. It should seldom be above 20%. It can go as low as 7% to sound cool.
Another setting that will make the reverb develop in interesting ways is the X Bass setting. It may be labeled Hi Filter too, but basically, it is the multiplier for the low end of a reverb. A 1X value is the algorithm as it was coded. If the values run 1 – 10 like on most Yamaha reverbs, you are on your own to figure out what they wanted to be the original algorithm. I would normally say DON’T use Yamaha reverbs at all because they are some of the most garbage can sounding things I have ever heard in my life. I find that .8X works most of the time. Here and there you may go up to 2X, but usually only for reverbs assigned to very bright sounding instruments.
Spend a lot of time on developing natural sounding reverbs and save those to use later. You will find yourself using a lot of the same 2 or 3 reverbs in most stuff you mix. Really. Don’t settle for factory presets. Get into the unit and play around a lot and find the reverbs that sound like rooms you have been in before. These are the most desirable ones to use.
Here and there you are going to create special reverbs that are very intentional effects, Use these sparingly of the course of a whole CD of several songs. Overuse numbs the user to the effect.
Whether you assign a channel Pre or Post EQ to the reverbs really depends on what you want the frequency to be accentuated with the reverb. You may have some cut EQ on a snare drum at around 2KHz, but you may want that to be where your snare’s reverb to reside. It would make sense in this case to use a Pre EQ aux send to feed the reverb. If however you are boosting like 400Hz to get the snare to have a little body because it was tracked a little thin sounding, a Post EQ aux send may serve you better because a Pre EQ aux send in this case will not have enough low end content to excite the reverb in the way you want. Think it through, and when in doubt, try both ways.
Also, Pre and Post Fader aux sends can be useful when assigning a track to a reverb send. Sometimes I have a whole bunch of snare in the overheads and I am depending upon that overhead track to supply most of the snare sound. Now it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to feed the overhead mics to a reverb, so how do you get a snare to excite a reverb? Easy, you assign a Pre Fader aux send to the reverb and just keep the fader down on the snare track and turn the Pre Fader aux send up on the snare channel. Cool eh?
Ed
So for all of you wanting the GREAT information, I have typed it out for you today. Enjoy!!