Use of reverb on nonvocal tracks

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pathdoc

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Hi everyone, I have a question for you. I typically add reverb to vocal tracks and sometimes to guitar tracks. I never add reverb to bass or drums. I'm happy with my final mixes but wonder if I'm approaching reverb in the wrong way. Should I add reverb sparingly to the entire mix so everything has the same sonic space? I recently tried sending the entire mix of a simple song that has only acoustic guitar, acoustic bass and vocals through my homemade plate reverb and liked the result, however, what's considered the normal approach; reverb on selected channels or reverb on everything?

Thanks in advance
Steve

PS, if you have any interest in see my DIY plate reverb it can be seen here
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=244927
 
The 'normal' approach is to do what the mix is telling you to do.

Granted - it's fairly unusual to apply reverb to low-heavy sources (bass, kick), but it does happen occasionally for flavor. To put a whole mix "in the same room" would be another one. Not typical, but it's not completely unheard of.
 
Yes, putting the mix in the same room is exactly what I'm talking about. Having a heavy reverb on an electric guitar with a dry bass doesn't bother my ears but I wonder if it should? Same with vocals with reverb sitting in a mix with dry bass and drums.
I realize I should approach mixing based on my own ears, but I wonder if my ears simply aren't trained enough to pick up on reverb mismatches.
 
I think the key answer is "Reverb where reverb is necessary"

Its such a versatile effect you can get really creative with it, and what one person may like another may hate. Personally I love filling the snare out with a huge gated reverb, but then I'm the kind of person that pays to see Motley Crue in concert, so its a matter of taste and music style.

The notion of putting reverb on the entire track can have some uses, but I wouldn't say its a normal thing to do. For quiet acoustic recordings (like yours) it can be very powerful at making everything sound like its playing in the same room, which is nice, but on a full on heavy metal mix reverb on the whole track will just muddy up otherwise nice takes.

If it helps, I personally use reverb the most in these cases...

  • A room reverb on the lead vocals with a long pre-delay (30ms+) to make them jump forwards a bit
  • A large hall style reverb with a high pass filter for LIGHTLY applying to guitars and drum overheads
  • I sometimes use mono delays/reverbs for effect, on backing vocals or the aforementioned snare

That's it. I'm not a pro though so what I do certainly doesn't represent the "industry standard"
 
You're absolutely correct, really depends on the song. I was thinking of this particular song which is entirely acoustic and pretty mellow with no drums. It seems to work in this setting.
 
yeah, reverb is cool on acoutic guitars especially. I suppose when you hear an acoustic you imagine an unshaven man with a cigar sat on a stage in an empty bar - so a nice reverb kind of helps to re-create that image in my opinion.

With this sort of thing though I've found it really helps to do it, leave it, have a cup of tea and watch the simpsons, then come back to it and see if it still sounds as cool as it did when you were mixing it. You ears get accustomed to it easily.
 
I tend to not like reverb so much on low things like kick and bass guitar because it sounds boomy. I like reverb on snares, not on hihat. For slow songs, especially like a 6/8 ballad, I'll use a pretty long reverb time, maybe 3 sec on the snare. Fast songs a shorter setting, maybe 1 sec or less. I use Yamaha reverbs and there's a parameter where you can make the sound dry and the reverb doesn't come in for 80 ms. They call it pre-delay, the delay before the reverb starts. I use that and it helps the sound stick out and not sound muddy, which it will if there's reverb right from the start.

It's based on the thought that in a room if someone says something to you the first thing you hear is the sound directly from their mouth with no reverb and then a moment later you start to hear the refections.

I like to totally soak strings (I use a Roland SC-8850) in reverb so the tails of the notes are whispy. Horns sound great with reverb. Sometimes I do put reverb on the kick and the bass, but not usually, I usually count on the room that the song will be played back in to do that, as I'd rather have none/almost none compared to even the tiniest bit too much on the lower instruments.

Also, an old trick is to record the reverb on to a track and eq that. Nowadays you can do that in the reverb. Often I roll the bass off of the reverb to make itsound like "AHHHHhhhh" and that's mostly high end.
 
dintymoore said:
Also, an old trick is to record the reverb on to a track and eq that. Nowadays you can do that in the reverb. Often I roll the bass off of the reverb to make itsound like "AHHHHhhhh" and that's mostly high end.
Click to expand...

Does it necessarily need to be recorded down first? I don't know what DAW or
multitrack you use, but in Pro Tools or using a large mixing console, you can
bring the reverb back to separate tracks in real-time and EQ them there.

(Auxiliary tracks in PT, channels on a mixing console)

Something I like doing (particularly on snare drums) is having the dry snare
sound, and then send it to a reverb through a compressor, that squashes the
living hell out of it. After this, I might bus both the dry and the wet signal to
a separate track and compress it again. You can get a huge sounding snare!

Oh, and something I picked up on last night is that with digital reverbs,
if you're applying reverb to toms, diffusion is almost always a bad idea. I
leave it at zero. Otherwise you tend to get a strange slappy effect on the
reverb from the drumstick, and it sounds awful.

Just a thought :)
 
philbagg said:
Does it necessarily need to be recorded down first? I don't know what DAW or multitrack you use, but in Pro Tools or using a large mixing console, you can bring the reverb back to separate tracks in real-time and EQ them there...
Click to expand...

No, I don't record it first, what you are talking about is a better way. I do it by using the eq that's built into my Yamaha SPX1000 that I use for reverb.

In the old days, they'd bring the reverb, say an EMT plate, back into two channels of the board and eq that, usually rolling off the bass and perhaps boosting the very highs like 16 - 20KHz.

That's where I got onto that - use two audio channels for your FX return instead of the FX return jacks so you can eq it. It's much better now that you don't need to record it to tape - it's still tweakable. I really like the sound when the bass is rolled off and the reverb sounds borderline thin.
 
dintymoore said:
It's much better now that you don't need to record it to tape - it's still tweakable. I really like the sound when the bass is rolled off and the reverb sounds borderline thin.
Click to expand...

I agree. One thing that troubles me about reverb (maybe it's the plug-ins I'm
using or I just haven't figured it out yet) is the hiss-like sound on the decay,
especially when using it on drums. I don't want always want it to be dark, but
the "sssssssss" sound on the tail is a bit annoying and cheap-sounding. I've
tried shelving filters and low-pass filters and both make it sound muffled.

:confused:
 
The reverb that comes with the Lexicon Omega sounds good to me. Most of the plug ins, for that matter plug in reverbs and softsynths don't do it for me.

As far as having to tweak the reverb, I'm of the mind that it's got to be 99.9% of the way there before I'll even bother tweaking it, most reverbs you hear you can tell they are fucked and there's nothing you're going to be able to do with it.

Almost all reverbs are pretty horrible.

I'm using my Yamaha SPX1000 that's 16 bit but at least I like the sound. The Yamaha's are the only cheap units I've found I like.
 
pathdoc said:
Having a heavy reverb on an electric guitar with a dry bass doesn't bother my ears but I wonder if it should? Same with vocals with reverb sitting in a mix with dry bass and drums.
I realize I should approach mixing based on my own ears, but I wonder if my ears simply aren't trained enough to pick up on reverb mismatches.
Click to expand...
I've struggled with this. Sometimes, you'll like something and it sounds OK to you then you'll read of or hear alot of people who 'know what they're doing' going the opposite way and making it seem like that which you liked is pure idiocy and a sure sign of an amateur newbie, even though some of those people will declare that there are no rules.......But Massive and Yorkshire Trippe of the kingdom of Sheffield are right - one person's meat is someone else's poison. I remember once putting reverb on the bass on a very busy and cluttered song and mixing it was like operating on a rooster's gallstone ! I thought "I ain't going there again !!". It was so difficult and I hated it. But recently I put some reverb on a kick because it was a very sparse part of that song and it worked. You have to trust your ears, not listen thru someone elses. As an excercise, listen to a load of songs that you actually do like and see how much is in those songs that you dislike from a production point of view. I find lots of bits in songs that I don't like, like snare tones or lack of kick or hardly any bass or weedy guitars or vocals that grate......yet that never stops me loving the song and I wouldn't change any of them.
Who's to say that if one of your mixes sounds like it's floating off into space that it wasn't meant to be like that ?
 
I don't like to add reverb directly to drum tracks with the exception of the kick and the snare sometimes.

Here is somehting that works out well from time to time. Bounce your drums down and then add them again as a whole new stereo track. Then add you reverb and other effects to that and bring it up slowly in the mix until it is where you want it. That way you aren't messing too much with your original recording and you can add some depth as well.
 
The idea is not to be too formulaic about it. Let the song tell you what is needed. There are tracks that I've mixed that have been bone dry, and others where I've applied reverb to somethings and not others, and then there are tracks where I've applied a reverb globally. In each case, there haven't been specific reasons, derived from the songs, that have suggested their particular treatment. At times I've used reverb on bass and kit.

There is another factor that comes into play: fashion and taste. Around about the late seventies/early eighties, big reverbs were 'in'. In more recent times, there was a tendency to go for much drier overall sounds. Currently, I have a taste for reverb again, and am using much more than I used to.
 
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