6 Common Reverb Mistakes to Avoid

hello everybody hope you're doing marvelously well in this episode we're going to be talking about six reverb mistakes that we all make so number one forgetting to use eq on your reverb this is a big one if we go for instance here and grab our drum sound [Music] i have a reverb on the snare and i have a reverb on the kick and what i've done on the snare is i've high passed before the reverb if i undo the high pass have a listen to the snare [Music] now there's a low rumble in about 30 or 40 hertz going in there and we don't need to hear it it does not need to be going into the reverb what will happen is the reverb will exaggerate that low end and just give us like a low horrible ugly rumble which will kill all the definition and make that low end a mess in our mix so i'm applying some high passing and now we have this now on the kick drum i also have the same thing so if we listen to the kicks together you hear that beautiful ambience on there we can mute it a second so you can hear it with and without here's without bring it in [Music] and it sounds like natural reverb in a room great it's just good old-fashioned deverb but i have eq'd everything below about 160 out you don't hear it sounding like a thin reverb but what you don't hear is an exaggerated low end which could really destroy the definition on our mix having excessive amounts of reverberated low end going ball just hanging on is going to kill the definition down there you're not going to hear that thumping kick it's just going to be a big blend of low end mud so big trick obviously the abbey road trick is something we talk about a lot as well you can wipe off the top as well in this instance the low end is the biggest biggest deal i tend to take the high end off in situations where i've got maybe a very sibilantly very bright vocal or a very bright acoustic guitar where there might be some excessive picking so i'll wipe the high end off going into the reverb so that's not exaggerated so number two setting the wrong reverb time using too long a reverb now if you have a listen to this verse here with the lead the vocal [Applause] [Music] if we take this phrase here for instance in solo with the reverbs going the background [Music] if you listen to that whole length of phrase before the next one we're looking at well between phrases we're probably looking at a couple of seconds if you look up here you'll see the the length between each phrase but here obviously there is a decay here around about a second if i put a second reverb on there on my longer reverb which in this instance is a vintage reverb here which is the longer reverb i'm using on the vocal i've actually got a number of d verbs here one at uh about a third of a second and another one at a third of a second but with some uh pitch correction applied to it so this third reverb is my long reverb at the moment i've got it to set to just under two seconds one 1.92 let's have a listen to that we'll turn off everything else delays included the background the background now you'll notice something that even though it's set to 1.92 it's got quite quiet if there's a second between the end of one phrase at the beginning of another you'd think well i'll put a second's worth of decay on it actually i would probably do a little bit more than that because this becomes a point as it's decaying where it's be going to be pretty inaudible especially if there's any kind of instruments in there whatsoever so i think 1.92 might be a little excessive but it's probably close if i go to 1.5 the background if you hear that again where the breath is coming in the reverb's pretty much inaudible the background the background the back it's just under the breath but barely audible so it's just getting that right use your daw to find out how long it is between each phrase you know get an idea of what works now obviously tempos are really good if you can calculate how long say a quarter note are or two quarter notes are between each phrase into a length and an actual second's length that's pretty nice as well the reality is like i say always go slightly longer than the projected time because the decay will get to a point where it's inaudible but i've seen it many many times where people use incredibly long reverbs which can be fun when there's one or two instruments on ambient stuff if you've got a vocal a piano a vocal acoustic and you want it to be super open lush that's great and you can get away with this sort of you know 10 seconds fade into the background every turn [Music] so that's a wonderful wonderful effect with the vocal or one or two other things i do tend to find if i'm going to use a really long decayed reverb it might be one of the only reverbs i'm using so i might have it as an overall effect on a track i've had many many tracks or i've wanted a big reverb sound and i've ended up really not doing it very well because i'm using multiple reverbs when really one stereo long reverb would do the trick number three putting the reverb directly on the track okay here in lies the problem with that if you put the reverb on the track directly especially after you've been mixing it's going to completely change the level you'll have a lead vocal in there and you you want to make it sort of feel like it's just coming forward a bit that it's got some halo of reverb around it you put the reverb on the track suddenly the track now is quieter and you're not getting that desired effect you're not adding to something so create a stereo or you can do mono but create an auxiliary and on that auxiliary put your reverb preferably either with eq on the reverb or eq before the reverb and that way you can have the vocal sit out front and the reverb you can start bringing up underneath and you can get the balance just right you've got a starting point where your ears are familiar because just been mixing and now you're adding that effect now if you decided to put that reverb directly on the vocal you're pretty much starting again you're like wait there where's where's zero and you try and dial that in you're not going to get the same effect and quite frankly you're reducing lots and lots of opportunities lots of opportunity for volume rides or keeping the reverb at the same volume sometimes or doing like little automations that could be on separate reverb tracks now you might say this a little old-fashioned because it is from the days of being a mixer who worked on consoles and when we worked on consoles we would have obviously reverbs controllable from an auxiliary and the revo's will come back sometimes on channels and sometimes you know on faders and sometimes on auxiliary returns the beauty of that was of course is you can send many things to that reverb there's another really strong reason why you want to have a reverb on a separate auxiliary because you might have two or three or four things that you're feeding to it like an overall drum sound quite often on drum sounds i have a fake room where i get a room and i put a little taste of all of the drums into it and i get an overall drum sound so wherever possible try not to put the reverb directly on the track put it on a separate auxiliary it gives you so much more flexibility so number four not using stock reverbs that is a big mortal sin as i just explained a second ago i've got a couple of fun reverbs on here i've got an ik multimedia reverb and i've got of course valhalla but most of the reverbs i'm using on this track are stock i've got a d verb here on a vocal i've got a d verb with a pitch change for it on the vocal i've got some strings with another d verb on it i've got some effects that i'm doing on guitars using a d verb this is a stock reverb that comes with your daw and i'm not just trying to advertise pro tools reverbs whatever your daw is whether it be logic or ableton live whatever it might be fl studio q bass you know whatever it is i guarantee the stock effects in there probably pretty darn good and it's better to get to know your stock reverbs and delays really really well before you add on to it i don't know what you're really improving i mean there's some stock stuff like for instance the plate on a d-verb is fantastic and many many of my friends and like really great mixers that you know use the stock plate it's kind of a secret weapon we go to and go that's a great reverb and there are other great plates but the one that comes free with this dow freebie pro tools is a really great plate so number five not automating your reverbs this is a big deal so i've got the short reverbs going through here the whole time through the song they don't change volume but when the chorus comes in not only actually the reverb the delays come up and that's the longer reverbs it's coming up to just fill it out a bit the reality is is the chorus is dense it has the live drum kit comes in rather than program drums it has tons of guitars it just umps energy comes in background vocals everything so i need more verb it just gets soaked up by the rest of the track otherwise it's not going to suddenly feel like the track has got completely reverberated in fact it may just sound if we're lucky the same amount of reverb that i've got in the verse but i have to increase it for the chorus so don't be afraid to automate it and it's not only automating it for simple things like that like denser situations it's also the fun things you can do with automating reverb we could take the end of a word for instance you know like this word here if it was a word we wanted to punctuate and just crank it you know it could suddenly come up fun automation god bless [Music] sees it completely nutty but a lot of fun there you go automation don't forget that you can automate your reverbs it's a lot of fun and it can really really help you mixing number six getting a little bit too carried away having too many reverb types going on now in this song i have a lot of the d verb the single type of reverb and then i have a foul holler and i also have the ik multimedia so i am using three different kinds of reverbs but i have had many many mixes i've opened and people get really really carried away i like using multiple reverbs at different levels i actually will find using three reverbs on a vocal is pretty normal however getting too carried away and using something really really subtly different on say 30 different instruments is a complete and utter waste of time as much as i absolutely love putting ambience around things and there are better ways of doing it and don't be afraid if it's like stereo guitars for instance and you've got a couple of pairs to maybe create a stereo reverb and then just send little bits of it from multiple sources little tiny bits it's kind of a catch-22 because you want to have control over things but the last thing you want to do is get yourself in a situation where you have so many plugins going on you hear a build up of reverb and you're trying to figure out where it's coming from and that is quite painful when you're sitting there with 42 reverb plugins trying to turn all this one down and that one down and figure out what the problem is make your life simple and make sure you employ effects for a reason if you're putting a reverb on something why are you doing that if you've got a guitar and you want it to sound wider maybe you have the left hand guitar panned over here and you put the reverb on the right that is great it's serving a purpose it makes the width feel more maybe the right hand guitar goes over here and its reverb goes to the left oh absolutely fantastic but if you're just employing reverb for the sake of it start second guessing what you've got going on it is very very difficult because if you're using a lot of virtual instruments i know some of them in fact most of them come out so bone dry they have no feeling of being in a room but that's where sometimes things like the t-rex sunset sound plug-in is really really useful because you can get small booths and rooms and make them come back in and feel really really good so maybe having like a little fake room that you can just put little things in could just be underneath and just use to give things a little bit more dimension either way think about it logically don't just open up and put reverb and or any plugin on anything just for the sake of it make conscious decisions and i know you'll get much better results thank you ever so much for watching there has been another couple of reverb videos we've done so please click down here for other videos there's some tips and tricks ones where i did some really fun stuff in fact on this song where i use like the di and i put reverb on that while using the dry signal and blend them together there's lots of fun things that we do so check all of that out if you have any reverb do's and don'ts let us know down below have a marvelous time recording and mixing i'll see you all again very soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 126,738

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Reverb Tricks, Reverb Mistakes

Id: xtiefG8qKJM

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020