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Forums - Computer music & technology
Subject: bright reverb
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Original Message 1/8 11-Nov-05 @ 11:55 AM - bright reverb
jade
Posts: 7
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hi can someone plz give me some rough settings on how to get a bright reverb.
is a bright reverb more boosting of the high freqs? i know it shud be used on percussion
thanx
is a bright reverb more boosting of the high freqs? i know it shud be used on percussion
thanx
Message 2/8 11-Nov-05 @ 02:18 PM - RE: bright reverb
Dominic
Posts: 1128
Link?: No link
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http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/dec97/processorsdec.html
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Nov01/articles/advancedreverb2.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Nov01/articles/advancedreverb2.asp
Message 3/8 12-Nov-05 @ 02:50 PM - RE: bright reverb
well partly it's down to the reverb unit's programmes. Some are 'brighter' - if you think about it, reverb in a space can be brighter or 'darker' depending on the characteristics/construction/materials of the space. So to start with some revern unit's programmes begin by being more or less 'bright', after that it's down to eq, but you also have to match the reverb to the job you are doing. It doesnt fllow that a 'brighter' reverb patch selected to begin with will be the 'right' reverb for the required application...
so the problem is there's many variables, not least of which is the actual reverb unit being employed., but generaly speaking, a brighter more top-end detailed reverb will be more present, and thus subjectively will probably sound 'more' reverb-y cos more detail of the sound is getting a reverb effect.
On the other hand you might want ONLY top end gloss reverb on a sound (mebbe BV's). whatever, if your reverb unit has no eq onboard or any ability to tweak the emphasis of the reverb then you need to add eq into the SEND chain either before or after the reverb (Return chain) - that way you can for example, send some vocals to a buss, take a send from the buss, pass it thru an eq, rll off the bottom end, send the top-end thru the reverb, and return ONLY a sort of glossy topend reverb to add 'frosting' to the vocals but to avoid any lower-end sound of the vocals getting reverb which might add muddyness, less defination, less subjective 'warmth' to the vocals etc.
But, if you DO add 'gloss' to such material as vocals you also need to be aware it'll 'harshen' any nasty artefacts in the top end content, so one obvious thing in vocals is 'frosting' verb can emphasis sibilance, so you might need to de-ess the vocals going TO the reverb even if the actual programme material vocal sounds fine and doesnt appear to need an de-essing.
btw, it's rare for anyone to get the chance to actualy study or be present in large reverberant spaces. I remember once going to visit a collective of sculptors in Germany who rented an huge old industrial factory with concrete walls ceiling & floor, the reverb in that space was phenomenal, absolutely amazing decay, the best you can get is perhaps to sneak into a museum (the museums in Berlin have some VERY big rooms) and before you get chucked out by security you can try a few handclaps and vocal sounds to hear the reverb... local churches are good for this. It's good to actualy go and listen to REAL large reverbs, I'd definately go and do this if you didnt already.... check it out
of course nowadays if your PC has decent grunt you can run impulse reverbs which load files of actual ambient spaces. there's free and 'pay' versions available and usualy plenty of reverb 'impulses' to d/load and use.
the main thing with reverb, and probably the biggest 'begginner mistake' is to pile on the reverb... it's the clasic noob cockup and the most common reply to noobs requesting an audition of their latest miesterwork is "Too much reverb!" (hey, it's happened to all of us right!)
when you first get a decent reverb unit (if a hardware user) or when you first get your new DAW, you play a solo sound thru some reverb and crank it up, and "wow!"... the wow factor takes over, cos really, any sound sounds more "wow" in isolation thru some reverb, and we assume it's good to go on everything, but all you get as a result is mush if you apply the same to a bunch of sounds in a mix no matter how basic.
also mixing in cans... reverb sounds better in larger quantities.. better than when played thru speakers, so you can mix on cans and think it's a 'huge' sound, but it's all mush thru speakers.
also DANCE music... reverb... hmm... for noobs it almost goes without saying that they will not have witnessed their material being played in a club... clubs generaly are boomy, and again, too much reverb will fuck up things defination wise. In fact, you might get a total 'street' mix ruff as anything which sounds dry and rather dull played on a high-fi or home studio speaker setup, but played at 10k in a club actualy sounds great!
you gotta be really careful about the mid/bottom end not being mushy, so again, the old PRE-REVERB EQ is good-to-go, cutting out lower-end frequencies in the SEND signal from reaching the reverb...
the way we perceive a sound is what it's about... you can take a recording of a person speaking.. remove the topmidrange and the intelligable part of the vocal reduces and the speech sounds muffled and undefined... Telephones have a VERY limited bandwidth because the actual part of the freq' spectrum we require to hear intelligable speech is actualy a very narrow band of frequencies in the upper midrange, so why waste digital bits & bandwidth transmitting frequencies thru the telephone network which we dont really need to 'hear' the speaker
from that you can see that all sounds have a 'presence' intelligability range where the MAIN detail is found, and outside of that limited range the upper and lower frequencies are not superfluous, but they simply add something of 'character' if heard at all (i'm not talking about undiscernable harmonics etc).. in the case of a telephone voice, sure, there is some lower-mid in their but solo'd it's a muffled sound like someone speaking thru a pillow, so we wouldnt want to add reverb to that freq range cos we'd just be adding reverb of a muffled undefined sound which would muddy the mix
so thats your key to reverb... to define the area of the sound's overall frequencies within which the 'intelligability' factor lies
but... on the other hand this intelligability area also emphasises the sound, so on the other hand you want to be careful how MUCH reverb you add to that portion of the freq range.. it's wether you're going for 'realistic' reverb or mix reverb you see, cos if you hear 2 people having a conversation in a church mebbe 20 yards away, the reverb actualy muddies the sound and makes the conversation audibley louder but not intelligable, you hear a sort of whispering garbled sound... so it may not be desirable to have a realitic reverb sound if that simply muddies up the who thing.
one good method for noobs is to start a basic mix totaly dry.. no reverb at all... do all your eq/levels etc to get a decent mix (dont go mad tho and take days, just a quick but decent mix), THEN start to add reverb, pushing up the send on the first item just a tiny bit, and let your ears try and detect the moment at which you perceive the reverb and being 'there'... to do it that way, dont set the reverb return HIGH or the master send control (if you have one) high... set the reverb up so that when the SEND is 100% UP, the reverb is humming nicely at a nominal UN-overloaded level with no clipping at the input
close your eyes, raise the send gently and stop when you perceive the reverb with your ears.
i'm quit passionate about that whole issue for noobs of 'mixing dry', i think it's really important to practice DRY mixes, beause FX like reverb can do so much to superficialy give a 'wow' factor (to see that, take all the FX OFF your guitar amp sim for example or a synth patch which has onboard FX and listen to the sound DRY... FX contribute ALOT to the overall wowo factor, so get used to mixing DRY... making mixes work WITHOUT reverb and delays... get that right and any mess with reverb becomes more identifiable... until you get that down there's little point moving on to stuff like using delay units or gates to delay or add evelopes to reverb attacks etc or doing reversed reverb FX etc, all of which are cool production tricks.
so the problem is there's many variables, not least of which is the actual reverb unit being employed., but generaly speaking, a brighter more top-end detailed reverb will be more present, and thus subjectively will probably sound 'more' reverb-y cos more detail of the sound is getting a reverb effect.
On the other hand you might want ONLY top end gloss reverb on a sound (mebbe BV's). whatever, if your reverb unit has no eq onboard or any ability to tweak the emphasis of the reverb then you need to add eq into the SEND chain either before or after the reverb (Return chain) - that way you can for example, send some vocals to a buss, take a send from the buss, pass it thru an eq, rll off the bottom end, send the top-end thru the reverb, and return ONLY a sort of glossy topend reverb to add 'frosting' to the vocals but to avoid any lower-end sound of the vocals getting reverb which might add muddyness, less defination, less subjective 'warmth' to the vocals etc.
But, if you DO add 'gloss' to such material as vocals you also need to be aware it'll 'harshen' any nasty artefacts in the top end content, so one obvious thing in vocals is 'frosting' verb can emphasis sibilance, so you might need to de-ess the vocals going TO the reverb even if the actual programme material vocal sounds fine and doesnt appear to need an de-essing.
btw, it's rare for anyone to get the chance to actualy study or be present in large reverberant spaces. I remember once going to visit a collective of sculptors in Germany who rented an huge old industrial factory with concrete walls ceiling & floor, the reverb in that space was phenomenal, absolutely amazing decay, the best you can get is perhaps to sneak into a museum (the museums in Berlin have some VERY big rooms) and before you get chucked out by security you can try a few handclaps and vocal sounds to hear the reverb... local churches are good for this. It's good to actualy go and listen to REAL large reverbs, I'd definately go and do this if you didnt already.... check it out
of course nowadays if your PC has decent grunt you can run impulse reverbs which load files of actual ambient spaces. there's free and 'pay' versions available and usualy plenty of reverb 'impulses' to d/load and use.
the main thing with reverb, and probably the biggest 'begginner mistake' is to pile on the reverb... it's the clasic noob cockup and the most common reply to noobs requesting an audition of their latest miesterwork is "Too much reverb!" (hey, it's happened to all of us right!)
when you first get a decent reverb unit (if a hardware user) or when you first get your new DAW, you play a solo sound thru some reverb and crank it up, and "wow!"... the wow factor takes over, cos really, any sound sounds more "wow" in isolation thru some reverb, and we assume it's good to go on everything, but all you get as a result is mush if you apply the same to a bunch of sounds in a mix no matter how basic.
also mixing in cans... reverb sounds better in larger quantities.. better than when played thru speakers, so you can mix on cans and think it's a 'huge' sound, but it's all mush thru speakers.
also DANCE music... reverb... hmm... for noobs it almost goes without saying that they will not have witnessed their material being played in a club... clubs generaly are boomy, and again, too much reverb will fuck up things defination wise. In fact, you might get a total 'street' mix ruff as anything which sounds dry and rather dull played on a high-fi or home studio speaker setup, but played at 10k in a club actualy sounds great!
you gotta be really careful about the mid/bottom end not being mushy, so again, the old PRE-REVERB EQ is good-to-go, cutting out lower-end frequencies in the SEND signal from reaching the reverb...
the way we perceive a sound is what it's about... you can take a recording of a person speaking.. remove the topmidrange and the intelligable part of the vocal reduces and the speech sounds muffled and undefined... Telephones have a VERY limited bandwidth because the actual part of the freq' spectrum we require to hear intelligable speech is actualy a very narrow band of frequencies in the upper midrange, so why waste digital bits & bandwidth transmitting frequencies thru the telephone network which we dont really need to 'hear' the speaker
from that you can see that all sounds have a 'presence' intelligability range where the MAIN detail is found, and outside of that limited range the upper and lower frequencies are not superfluous, but they simply add something of 'character' if heard at all (i'm not talking about undiscernable harmonics etc).. in the case of a telephone voice, sure, there is some lower-mid in their but solo'd it's a muffled sound like someone speaking thru a pillow, so we wouldnt want to add reverb to that freq range cos we'd just be adding reverb of a muffled undefined sound which would muddy the mix
so thats your key to reverb... to define the area of the sound's overall frequencies within which the 'intelligability' factor lies
but... on the other hand this intelligability area also emphasises the sound, so on the other hand you want to be careful how MUCH reverb you add to that portion of the freq range.. it's wether you're going for 'realistic' reverb or mix reverb you see, cos if you hear 2 people having a conversation in a church mebbe 20 yards away, the reverb actualy muddies the sound and makes the conversation audibley louder but not intelligable, you hear a sort of whispering garbled sound... so it may not be desirable to have a realitic reverb sound if that simply muddies up the who thing.
one good method for noobs is to start a basic mix totaly dry.. no reverb at all... do all your eq/levels etc to get a decent mix (dont go mad tho and take days, just a quick but decent mix), THEN start to add reverb, pushing up the send on the first item just a tiny bit, and let your ears try and detect the moment at which you perceive the reverb and being 'there'... to do it that way, dont set the reverb return HIGH or the master send control (if you have one) high... set the reverb up so that when the SEND is 100% UP, the reverb is humming nicely at a nominal UN-overloaded level with no clipping at the input
close your eyes, raise the send gently and stop when you perceive the reverb with your ears.
i'm quit passionate about that whole issue for noobs of 'mixing dry', i think it's really important to practice DRY mixes, beause FX like reverb can do so much to superficialy give a 'wow' factor (to see that, take all the FX OFF your guitar amp sim for example or a synth patch which has onboard FX and listen to the sound DRY... FX contribute ALOT to the overall wowo factor, so get used to mixing DRY... making mixes work WITHOUT reverb and delays... get that right and any mess with reverb becomes more identifiable... until you get that down there's little point moving on to stuff like using delay units or gates to delay or add evelopes to reverb attacks etc or doing reversed reverb FX etc, all of which are cool production tricks.
___________________________________
I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!
Message 4/8 15-Nov-05 @ 12:10 PM - RE: bright reverb
jade
Posts: 7
Link?: No link
File?: No file
wow thanx for the very detailed answer!!!
yeah i totally agree with you on the whole noobis add way too much reverb, i remember listening to some of my tracks i made a while back and just being horrified at the amount of reverb, i dont think i had my truths at the time so that probs had summit to do with it....but still no excuse
i very much agree with you on mixing the mix dry and adding the reverb in small amouts too, i do this now, or if i do add the reverb while im building the track just to get some idea of how it miht sound when it comes to mixing the track down il remove all the reverb first and then add it gradually.
i remember when i was a total noobi and would just load the same reverb patch and use it on everything!!!!! what!!! now i see that reverb needs the same skill and attention as everything else in the mix, i realise it is a very important tool.
just a few more questions: using the new reverb unit in reason 3 what would be some typical settings you would use for the percussion? or what are the best presets to go on? and also is it best to use the same reverb on all of the pecussion? i read somewhere in an article that you shud only stick to a few different reverbs in any one track. out of curiosity how many different reverb settings do you normally have in a track?
thanx for helping
jade
yeah i totally agree with you on the whole noobis add way too much reverb, i remember listening to some of my tracks i made a while back and just being horrified at the amount of reverb, i dont think i had my truths at the time so that probs had summit to do with it....but still no excuse
i very much agree with you on mixing the mix dry and adding the reverb in small amouts too, i do this now, or if i do add the reverb while im building the track just to get some idea of how it miht sound when it comes to mixing the track down il remove all the reverb first and then add it gradually.
i remember when i was a total noobi and would just load the same reverb patch and use it on everything!!!!! what!!! now i see that reverb needs the same skill and attention as everything else in the mix, i realise it is a very important tool.
just a few more questions: using the new reverb unit in reason 3 what would be some typical settings you would use for the percussion? or what are the best presets to go on? and also is it best to use the same reverb on all of the pecussion? i read somewhere in an article that you shud only stick to a few different reverbs in any one track. out of curiosity how many different reverb settings do you normally have in a track?
thanx for helping
jade
Message 5/8 15-Nov-05 @ 04:16 PM - RE: bright reverb
dont use V3 only have v2... well people might suggest that having different 'verbs' for drums makes the drums sound un-unified.. as if they are in different spaces, but that can go for other instruments... reverb can be used to immitate 'spaces' or with shorter verbs (ambiance) just to add presence etc.
all of that is tied up in the overall mix of the track of course... but, y'know... short 'coal-bunker' verbs obviously add 'liveness' to an otherwise dead/dry sound, but if the verb mix is kept low it doesnt mean the perc' has to actualy sound like it's in a small concrete box... if used it small touches it just adds some edge to the sound.
But again, it all depends on the whole mix within which the perc' parts sit, cos it might be desireable to have the perc' sound spacier, such as in dubs with the perc' swimming in a sea of spacey verb trailing off into the distance can sound well cool!
all of that is tied up in the overall mix of the track of course... but, y'know... short 'coal-bunker' verbs obviously add 'liveness' to an otherwise dead/dry sound, but if the verb mix is kept low it doesnt mean the perc' has to actualy sound like it's in a small concrete box... if used it small touches it just adds some edge to the sound.
But again, it all depends on the whole mix within which the perc' parts sit, cos it might be desireable to have the perc' sound spacier, such as in dubs with the perc' swimming in a sea of spacey verb trailing off into the distance can sound well cool!
___________________________________
I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!
Message 6/8 18-Nov-05 @ 03:14 PM - RE: bright reverb
what i've found is that often by adding reverb to a sound or two in the mix you seem to add reverb to every sound in the mix.
that there's somehow a residual rubbing-off of the effect of one signal onto the others.
i think the drums should often be amongst the last things you want to add much reverb to since it's better that they retain their sharpness and punch and not go mushy on you.
very inspiring post k!!!!!!
thank you!!!
that there's somehow a residual rubbing-off of the effect of one signal onto the others.
i think the drums should often be amongst the last things you want to add much reverb to since it's better that they retain their sharpness and punch and not go mushy on you.
very inspiring post k!!!!!!
thank you!!!
Message 7/8 18-Nov-05 @ 04:29 PM - RE: bright reverb
quote
what i've found is that often by adding reverb to a sound or two in the mix you seem to add reverb to every sound in the mix.
that there's somehow a residual rubbing-off of the effect of one signal onto the others
what i've found is that often by adding reverb to a sound or two in the mix you seem to add reverb to every sound in the mix.
that there's somehow a residual rubbing-off of the effect of one signal onto the others
thats true, it's a sort of psycho-acoustic phenomenon, probably cos similar freq' ranges from different instruments in the mix might sound 'reverbed' if the reverb is applied to another item in the mix with the same freq band... cos it all mixes together at the end of the day
___________________________________
I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!
Message 8/8 20-Nov-05 @ 08:33 AM - RE: bright reverb
i often equate to music on a graphic level...what you do with one thing affects what happens to the
other.
FOR INSTANCE>
if you took the whitest brightest human being imaginable and you placed him in the darkest unlit
room....you're going to find he's all-of-a-sudden become pretty unbright him/herself.
likewise...if you take the most darkest blackest man possible and placed him in a white room full of
1000 watt halogen lamps and all of a sudden he becomes the biggest brightest beamingest bit
of light imaginable.....
the same holds true especially of reverb.
it's like what you do to certain elements affect all the other instruments also.
by adding sufficient reverb to your main instruments (ie non-drums)
you create ambience within the drum mix that makes them sound like they are in the room
while retaining their crispness and clarity.
less reverb more clarity good....USUALLY.
not ALWAYS>
rule ONE...NO RULES.
other.
FOR INSTANCE>
if you took the whitest brightest human being imaginable and you placed him in the darkest unlit
room....you're going to find he's all-of-a-sudden become pretty unbright him/herself.
likewise...if you take the most darkest blackest man possible and placed him in a white room full of
1000 watt halogen lamps and all of a sudden he becomes the biggest brightest beamingest bit
of light imaginable.....
the same holds true especially of reverb.
it's like what you do to certain elements affect all the other instruments also.
by adding sufficient reverb to your main instruments (ie non-drums)
you create ambience within the drum mix that makes them sound like they are in the room
while retaining their crispness and clarity.
less reverb more clarity good....USUALLY.
not ALWAYS>
rule ONE...NO RULES.
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