Wax On Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 I'm fecking gash at using reverb. don't know if its my techniques or what, but i was thinking it would be handy if someone in the know could do something about using reverb, along with suggested plugins. whenever i try and add reverb it just sounds horrible. Reverb's supposed to sweeten a sound, not sour it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giraffe Dung Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 what effect are you trying to achieve? basically with reverb you're always going to make things sound more distant. if you have everything else dry and a load of reverb on one thing it's going to sound out of place. if you want your stuff to sound 'live' then you're going to have to put some reverb on pretty much everything to achieve that organic sound. remember though that it's all relative- your head will figure out the driest thing and the wettest thing, so if something's very very dry in the mix it's going to affect how you perceive everything else and vice versa. everything might sound more 'real' when drenched in reverb but you can often dial down the settings fairly uniformly and achieve the same effect with more clarity. when i make sampled beats i hardly ever use reverb on the samples because they're all 'real' anyway and have their own reverb. if i was to layer a keyboard over a sampled beat i would use a light reverb to help it sit better. if your computer's up to it i wouldn't really bother using anything other than convolution reverbs now unless you're going for a particular effect. they sound so much better than synthetic reverbs. at a very basic level you can find an impulse you like, and then just dial up the wet/dry until you get the sound you're after. if you really want to go further than that you can adjust the reflections, length, etc to really fine tune... try to 'think real', if that makes sense. finally i've always been told the golden rule of conventional effects is to set it so you can't tell it's on until you turn it off. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wax On Posted February 10, 2009 Author Share Posted February 10, 2009 Cheers mate. The thing i'm going to want to do is when using drum hit samples rather than loops, make them sit in with the samples. i've not been using convolution reverbs, and the ones that i have been using sound shit IMO. I'll try convolution reverbs. I don't do anything too processor intensive, so hopefully using them won't hammer my CPU too badly. I also want to incorporate synths in some stuff. I got a few vintage synth type vsti's and want to make them sit in with samples, so i guess thats another thing to use reverb on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x2k Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 I've still got a lot to learn about reverb but I'll try and give you a few tips (which might all be really obvious) anyway... Firstly don't use too much of the stuff, over use of reverb will distroy your track, I used to find it was a bit hard to tell if the reverb was doing any good unless I cranked it right up but the more I use is the more I appreciate subtle amounts of reverb. I tend to use reverb for 4 different reasons... 1) To widen a sound an to push it back in the mix a bit. This is probably the most obvious thing you can use it for. It just man a sound which sounds obvious and harsh sound a bit more diffused an further away. To do this simple wack it on the sounds you want and play about with the settings until it sounds nice. You will probably do this on an insert channel and set it so it's mostly dry with a little bit of wetness (probably anywhere up to about 15%) 2) To put sounds into the same space. Some times you have a load of different sounds going on and they all sounds like they were recording in different room at different times (if your using a selection of samples then they probably were). To make the sounds sound like they're actually in the same room/space run them all through the same reverb unit together. Do this by putting a the reverb on a send bus set to 100% wet then send your various sounds to it. Again settings here are going to vary depending on what you want so have a play. 3) Atmospherics and effects. Basically to get a bit noise to pad out a some frequencies and to make the track sound a bit more alive then you can wack a reverb on pretty much any sound (short one work well) and crank the time, size and wetness up nice and high then a tiny little blip tunes into a nice airy sound. 4) To bring something right out of the mix. Generally reverbs tend to push things back into the mix but sometimes it can reinforce something like a vocal track and making it stand out more, I think for this you generally want quite short reverb times and fairly small size to make it sounds nice and close. The problem with reverbs though is then introduce all sorts of unwanted frequencies so then can really muddy shit up. The solutions to this are to eq/filter after the reverb, I often find a low cut is required or if you are using lots of different reverbs which are introducing a mess of sounds together then try bussing them together and using a single reverb unit to process several of the sounds together. So my tips are, don't over use, eq after if necessary and if putting reverb on a lot of different sounds try bussing them together instead. Like I said, I'm not reverb expert and hopefully others will have other stuff to add to what I've said. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giraffe Dung Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 if you're sampling your drums off vinyl you just need to be very careful with reverb as you'll end up making it almost impossible to get them knocking without wetting everything else even more. the best drums you can find are ones with full tails so you can use them in full. if you can't find them, or your favourite sounds are without them or just sound punchier with the tail chopped off, try layering another version under itself and creating a tail for it with a reverb. you can even fade out the attack of the reverbed version so you just end up with a synthetic tail to layer with your sound. this helps to stop that sterile feeling when you program chopped sounds. if you're not sampling off vinyl and the files are super dry and clinical, it's not just reverb but also probably saturation or overdrive that's going to thicken them up to compete with samples. smart compression will also help glue your sounds together somewhat, especially if you have some faint reflections always going on and you set the threshold quite low and the ratio quite high. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wax On Posted February 10, 2009 Author Share Posted February 10, 2009 Thats wicked, thanks mate Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Banano Posted February 28, 2009 Share Posted February 28, 2009 Turn it down to where you can just hear it. Then turn it down a wee bit more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted February 28, 2009 Share Posted February 28, 2009 Blimey, it's been a while since you posted on here mate. How's it going? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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