How to add reverb in REAPER using ReaVerb

things are starting to sound more like a finish recording but it still sounds a little flat to me and this is where reverb comes in adding reverb can add a sense of space to the audio giving it the effect that it's actually in a real room and if you've ever clapped your hands in a large hall or gymnasium you're familiar with the sound of reverb but because we recorded the song in a small room in my house that's what it sounds like so by adding a reverb plug-in we can actually give the impression we're in a much larger space now we're going to add this plug-in a little differently than we did the previous plugins we want to add reverb to our two vocal tracks both the main vocal as well as the harmony so how do we do this because so far we've just put a plug-in right on a track well we actually have to create a new track for our reverb plug-in that we send our vocal and harmony vocal to and by doing this the two vocals actually blend in the reverb making it sound a little bit more realistic and also it's a little bit easier on our computer because we're only running one plug-in instead of two let me show you how to do this first thing we need to do is make a new track so I'm going to double click in the track area here and I'm going to call this vocal verb verb for reverb next thing I need to do is actually make this mixer area a little taller and that's going to show us a few more items that we couldn't see until now so now we I can actually see the individual plugins that are on each of these tracks and we're going to add the reverb plug-in to our vocal verb which we can now do by just clicking on this track insert effects right here and we're going to use reverb it's right here under the Cocos filter say okay here it is in all its glory but there's nothing really here right now we're going to have to load a preset and I really like mellow halt there are actually two versions of a lot of these presets and that's because one of them is made for a send like we're doing right now and the other is made for an insert where we're actually putting the reverb directly on the channel so in this case I'm going to use audio curr send mello haul our reverb is now loaded so how do we get the vocals to get into this reverb because they're not on the same track well that's what this area just below the inserts is this is the send area in fact if I just hover there you can see it says track sends and sends are used so that we can send audio to multiple places at once so let me show you all we need to do is click here and drag it to where we want to send it to in this case we want to send it to the vocal verb I just drag over here let go and a new little window pops up telling us we've created a send to vocal verb and that's all we really need to know we actually don't need to do anything with this we can just close this window so now we have a send on our track and it's telling us that it's sending to vocal verb right here and this is actually kind of a little horizontal fader we can adjust by clicking and dragging up and down over the little circle on the right hand side like so you can see it's reading out a number down and that's telling us what the level is that it's sending out so we have a fader here that's sending audio to the vocal verb and I've got the main fader here which is then sending to this folder track which is then sending to our master fader so there's a lot of things going on right now so let's solo this vocal track and hear what's going to happen let's move to the end of the song let's go to this last verse I'm going to zoom in here okay let's play come on May this pane well there we go we definitely have some reverb now now that's a little too much for me so I want to turn down the send so I'm going to just play that again and I'm just going to adjust the send level while it's playing come May this pain pass away our paths will cross again someday the same old way that seems better it's there's reverb there but it doesn't seem to be all-encompassing it doesn't sound like I'm singing in a cave so now if we want to add reverb to the Harmony track we can do the exact same thing which is just like clicking here in the sends area and dragging over to the vocal Ferb this just confirms that we're sending our harmony to the vocal verb will close that add that to the solo and we'll take a listen to this come on may this pain pass away ah now it's actually sending more of the harmony because the harmony is up here and it's still at 0 DB so whereas this is sitting at minus 15 point eight so this is actually sending quite a bit more to the reverb I'm going to hit play and I'm going to pull the level down of the harmony that's sending to the reverb so that I get a good blend between the two come on may this pain pass away up as Lacrosse again someday I like that I don't mind having a little bit extra reverb on the harmony vocal so why not adjust the actual vocal reverb on this track fader here well we could certainly do that but that's going to change the reverb level for both tracks and once we've got a blend we're happy with controlling the reverb level with the track fader makes sense but while we're getting that level we want to use the send faders here next thing I want to do I'm going to close this window and I'm going to add the vocal verb to our vocal folder so I'm going to go over here click drag and I'm going to pull it up until that blue line just tucks in a little bit on the left and let go so now the vocal verb is part of our vocal folder and I'm actually going to color code it too so that it matches that's just right clicking track color set to custom colors and I'm going to use the same red there we go now I know at a glance that all these tracks are related well let's unsolo the vocal in the harmony and listening context crawls cancer the same sounding good let's listen a little earlier in the song so we could hear a little bit better without all the other tracks in fact maybe actually verse four would be the best place to hear this that's the breakdown kind of the breakdown verse here we go ladies gone away he left and yet still remain the same that's sounding good to me it's just adding a little bit more depth I'm going to play that again what I'm going to do is I'm going to mute the reverb after the first few words if you just watch the mute button here when it goes red you'll know that it's off and you'll be able to hear the difference here we go left and ya still remain so there you go it off the same and on it just adds a little bit of extra depth and I mean you're probably only going to notice if you're listening on good headphones or good speakers but it's the little details like that that really set your mix apart from somebody else's okay so the last thing I want to do is go into editing the reverb now I'm not going to go too deeply into this but if you want to have some fun just follow along with me here quickly I'm actually going to go to the drums and add reverb on the drum track because I just want to add it to the drum so I don't need to do a send in this case so go to reverb and we're going to load bright room as an insert the solo our dress I'll turn this off and we're going to just take a quick listen okay now I'm going to turn our reverb on there we go so it's got a bit more of a snap to it now now if you want to in under the reverb generator you can have some fun with this you can do things like change the length you can make the length of really short but I can make the room size really big and you think that those things go together and they kind of do but when you go the opposite direction with them you can get some interesting results take a listen it's almost like a 80s kind of gated reverb sound so there's a lot of neat little things you can do you can also make the length really really long and make the room size really big and hear that it's going to sound like a cavern drummers in a cave so you can you can really do a lot to change the kind of space that the drummer's in now the other thing I should point out is when we're in insert mode to adjust the level of the reverb to the dry signal which is the unprocessed what we call dry you use the wet and dry faders on this side so we want to leave our dry just at zero so we're not touching that and our reverb which is the wet it will be in the negative but you can make sure that it fits in the mix better so let's just hear that pull it right down turn it up okay I'm going to go back to something that's a bit more like that gated reverb sound we had which I think was around something like this let's hear that turn the damping up and turn they get that mix down I don't want it to be quite so prominent turn it off and on I think I like that but I'm going to have to hear it in the song let's take a listen ah excellent well I'm happy with how my vocals and my drums now sound a little more lively I'm going to play around with the rest of this and just see how good I can get this sounding

Channel: Audiohackr

Views: 51,945

Keywords: music recording, music production, DIY music, audio recording, audio production, audio engineering, how to record music, REAPER (Software), DAW, digital audio workstation, reverb

Id: 9tizYvZDikE

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2016