Why your REVERBS & DELAYS sound AMATEUR!

foreign [Music] like all of you I love Reverb and delay they always sound cool until they don't you can mess up your mixes pretty quick if you're not careful I have a few tips for you that I think will help you out most of the time it's in the small details the subtleties but sometimes you got to go all out to demonstrate these Reverb And Delay techniques I thought it would be a good idea to write a song a slow ballad actually about Reverb and delayed so be sure and stick around to the end of the video where I share my multi-angled music video [Music] the most common tutorial you're going to find on reverb and delay is whether or not you should put those reverbs and delays on the actual track as inserts or on auxiliary returns if I know that there is a specific sound that I want on a specific instrument then I will simply put it on that track as an insert for example I've got this guitar patch and for now I'm going to mute what I'm sending to the returns just so you can see it and I'm going to mute these delays [Music] let's look at this first Echo boy which is from soundtoys which I could not live without you can see right from the beginning I have a vibrato patch at 20 milliseconds and basically I'm trying to add a little bit of movement to the sound I'll admit that one of the reasons I'm using a modulation style effect with the delay is that my intonation's just a little bit off on the guitar and on the lap steel when you add a little bit of that modulation in with the delay it helps mask some of the tuning deficiencies on my end and notice my mix level is set low here because I'm making an adjustment on how much I want when it comes to the returns they are all set to a hundred percent because I control how much of that dry sound I'm sending to it with this send control and then I have this second insert here notice I've got it set to an eighth note and a dotted eighth note and I've also got a little bit longer of a feedback so I'm treating this almost like a stomp box effect and I make adjustments specifically for that guitar if I wanted to increase the saturation or the low cut or the high cut I'm only affecting that one signal so here's my lap steel I tracked this part dry which is something that I would never do if I was playing live it's a swell part it would have plenty of Reverb and delay but now I can go in and add it all inside the box I wanted that kind of old school Vibe so I went with a spring reverb not a ton of it low mix but and then I added this Valhalla delay they're all fifty dollars everything Valhalla makes highly recommended got a little bit of feedback you've got quarter notes and dotted eight and most of these delays have built-in eqs and modulation again I'm adding some modulation to this slap steel that requires sliding and bending because my intonation is nowhere near perfect it also has a color and a drive which just makes those decays feel more like an analog delay as opposed to a digital delay I have a number of vocal tracks here I split off the verse vocal because I wanted to treat it differently this year's a song about Reaver this here is a song about Reverb I'm going fairly heavy on this 64 second 30 IPS tape echo which is basically a slap delay the space around the notes we sing and play the reason why I wrote this verse is I wanted to write something with quite a few words as opposed to the chorus which has very few words because you need to treat vocals different if there is a lot going on when you are singing one word and it's held out for a long time or just a few words you can add more effects to it because you are reproduc using that sound over and over again and when it's easy to understand and it's nice and fluid well those delays ring out for a long time for instance Reaver and delayed I'll talk about automation here in a second but on the verse vocal I don't have all that this here's a song about Reaver the space around that would make it sound like a huge mess and it would be unintelligible is that the right way to say that I think it is that's why when you listen to certain Styles like rap or even country or whenever there's a lot of words being presented to you there's usually not a ton of Reverb but one of the ways that we make it feel like it's in a space is to use a slap delay which is very similar to a Reverb but it's just hitting that sound right back at you very quickly this here's a song about Reaver the space around the notes we sing it can be used subtly to just feel like the vocal is a little bit farther back and not right up in your face or it can be used as an obvious effect thank you all Daws use different terminology and layouts but basically that means you set up a Reverb off to the side and you can send a little bit of every track to that Reverb this is how I have my return set up I don't always use a template like this but for this video this is what we're rolling with notice that I have a plate a room a hall a long verb a slap delay left a slap delay right and a long delay for my room Reverb tsar1 which is a soft tube Reverb that I love I'll talk about these more in depth as we go but just to show you kind of what I'm using for a longer haul I have the pro R then we have long verb a super long four and a half seconds almost a slap delay left a slap delay right I'm using these plugins that come with Pro Tools it doesn't matter what you use and then I have Valhalla delay set up for a long delay sure some reverbs might sound better than others but it's really more about how you use the reverbs and the delays than the quality of the Reverb And Delay so I'm going to use these returns when I want to send multiple Sigma signals through those same spaces I have it set up this way for a number of reasons one cohesiveness it makes the instrument sound the same when you put them through the same reverbs and if you put a little bit through the plate a little bit through the room and a little bit through the hall you start creating your own unique space it's also easier on processing power this was a big issue 20 years ago even 10 years ago not so much now especially with my computer it's a beast these also have become part of my sound more importantly I know exactly what is on each one of these channels I might change the settings for each one for instance I might take the room from one and a half seconds to 1.8 seconds and I might change out the hall for a different haul but it's pretty much always going to be a plate a room and a hall what I'll do is I'll go to a previous track that I've mixed and Import in all of those returns so if I start adding something in and using it all the time it just becomes part of my session the way that Pro Tools is set up these are my sins for each and I try to put them on the same level so I've got my slap delay here room plate long to the long Reverb so I quickly want to add more room rooms the electric guitar I know that my room for this electric guitar is usually on send b here so I'll click on it and make some adjustments to it it's a quick efficient way to work normally I start with the room Reverb because what I'm trying to do is put my sounds in a space the acoustic guitar the vocals they were all recorded tight in this space so they don't have any Ambience whatsoever let's look at my acoustic guitar just for fun I will boost this up [Music] notice I'm using a modern Guitar Room preset no pre-delay this is what I'm going to focus in on the time thank you [Music] that kind of one second area felt natural for this particular tune and then I'll go through and adjust the darkness and the brightness a lot of times this reveals weird artifacts in the Reverb and you want to get rid of them but with such a small space I don't want it to sound too dark long weird decays aren't going to bother me so much but I want to make sure that the room sounds kind of bright and nice [Music] particular Reverb has a tone control and a high cut foreign [Music] but I don't want any pre-delay because I wanted to be in the space immediately I don't want there in this case to be a separation between my original sound and the Reverb I want it to all kind of be together and then I'll bring this back to a level that makes sense to start building my space [Music] what might sound like too much exposed by itself might be perfect in the mix or vice versa I'm just starting to feel it out and then I I go to all the other instruments that might need to feel like they're in a room you have to be careful with Bass because bass can get kind of washed out and funky pretty fast but I do want it to sound like it's in an amp in a room about this slap that I've got here I like to have nice wide sounding mixes but when you throw an instrument out all the way to one side it can sound kind of unnatural when you put headphones on when you're listening it's just like that's a that's pretty far out there let's just move this over to the far right [Music] as I bring it up you can start to hear it in the left speaker but what I've done here is I have set up two sins we've got our slap left and then slap delay right I'm rolling off the low frequency in the low mids before I get to the delay and I have about a 50 millisecond delay this particular slap left is panned all the way to the left so in some ways it's an alternative to using a room Reverb or in this case I'm using it along with the room revert let's mute the room okay to make it feel a little less unnatural right you've got your main signal all the way on the right and when you put that slap delay there is a like a copy of it just a little bit behind and then we can add our room in [Music] I don't want to lose definition out of my picking guitar and the more Reverb I add to it I lose definition and by doing the slap delay trick I feel like I can keep a little bit more of the definition of my guitar as I'm raising the volume let's talk about the long delay that I have set up and it's mostly going for my vocal whenever you have a long Reverb or long delay you need to know exactly what you're sending into that Reverb And Delay because it's going to be there for a long time so if there are any frequencies that you don't want to delay delay delay then you need to get rid of them before they go to the delay or inside the delay and I'm doing a combination of both in one way that I get around that by keeping my main vocal natural in this case I'm taking the double which I'm trying to sing exactly like the main vocal but it's slightly different Reverb I'm rolling off the low frequencies I'm rolling off the high frequencies but I'm shrinking down the frequency spectrum and then inside of the delay I have additional modulation I'm rolling off the top end so 3050 Hertz instead of all the way up at 20 or whatever and I'm not delaying anything below 380. so all the body of my voice is not making it to the delay so you get this notice it's a quarter note delay and when I put it on quarter note it puts exactly what quarter note is at 89 beats per minute in milliseconds however these are left and right sometimes if you take even if it's quarter note and you make one a little bit faster than the other or one a little bit slower than the other it helps it stand out a little bit more and so instead of hearing this in your ears left and right you're hearing this listen delay and delay delay I have slowed these down a little bit so the delay delay delay delay delay now that's a creative Choice sometimes you want it to be locked right on the grid but in this case I like the fact that it's slower I think it fits the vibe of the song better than if it was faster so think about whether or not you want to make little adjustments to the times so that it feels a little more natural and adds a little more width especially if you're going left and right this is very much an analog delay sounding or it's a vintage type sound meaning you're going to lose some of the top end with every delay let me replace this just for fun with a straight up digital delay quarter note let's listen to the word delay and delay let's add a longer feedback file that away now listen to this foreign it's heavily affected maybe more than it should be but act like it but you can hear the roll off and that makes it feel like it's getting farther away and moving back in the space as well as getting quieter but one thing you can also do add it to my long verb which we haven't talked to you about yet but now what if I do this [Music] so sometimes if you want to smooth out that delay even more you can bus it through a Reverb so you can send and then send again I love these reverbs that have additional modulation control it's really popular right now with the youngins I think to have warbly tape type sounds and you can do that with other plugins before or after the Reverb a lot of times you can do it inside and these color and age adjustments allow you to dirty up the signal now you don't want to do it too much you can get too vibey and kind of unintelligible it's all about using those controls to dial in exactly what you want obviously you are hearing some automation on this vocal part in Pro Tools this is the level that's going to the long Reverb we can see the word Reverb and if I pull up this sin you will see what's happening I am only delaying the word delay and I can bring the sin up and down immediately immediately when I'm done with the word once it's sent to the delay then the delay is doing its thing look at what happens if I put the word and in here I don't necessarily want it to say and delay I just want the word delay delay delay and delay delay my long verb I have an EQ rolling off the low frequency and then I have this Pro R to me I go for this when I want more of a natural sounding longer Reverb and delayed so what I'm doing here is the opposite I am ducking the amount of it's going to the reverb when I say the word delay but I have it louder when I'm saying the word Reverb delay [Music] River and delay I was a little sick that day so I was bottoming out I also don't know what I was thinking right here I know that's a simple explanation no you shouldn't I don't talk like that and that's what we call the link but let's listen to these background vocals just for fun foreign [Music] let's talk about s's real quick in my verse and in my chorus I have a de-esser this here is a song about Reaver you can see that it's hitting the s's pretty hard up in these high frequencies and so I'm de-essing up in those this here's a song about Reaver sometimes de-essers can sound unnatural so what I've done here is I've gone in and cut all the s's this here is a song and I've brought it down 2.8 decibels now if I bring it way down you get this this here's a song terrible lisp this here is a song If you have an unnaturally recorded sound just by the way it works with microphones and you hit the Reverb with that s all you're going to hear in the Reverb and delay is so be careful with your S's and spend a lot of time to make sure you get that right let me show you one of the creative ways that I used Reverb And Delay so here's my piano track so I took this entire track I duplicated and made this track and I reversed it I ran it through a compressor and I ran it through echoboy using a space Echo setting eighth note a dotted quarter note long feedback full mix so you get this so then I printed that and then we have this track which I then ran through the room the long delay the long verb and I believe I did a little automation on it as well it's kind of chaotic because it's not playing the same exact chords as I'm playing but it almost always leads to some really cool moments and you can see I pushed it in the beginning I'm rolling off all the low frequencies listen to it right in this section [Music] is it solid [Music] I thought that made for a cool moment I'm a big believer in taking the source material that you already have and manipulating it because it's already has the same DNA right it's reversed and it's all tricked up but it still fits with the piano and it sounds like it's an effect on the piano but it's its own thing what's those in everything I'm gonna mute all the delays and reverbs that are on this track [Music] all back on [Music] let's listen to the verse and do the same thing this year's a song about the space there's a song [Music] Especially listen to those guitars [Music] not so of course I had to record myself playing all these in a very serious way so here is the track in its entirety [Music] thank you this here's a song about evil the space around the notes [Music] sometimes they need to go on and on that's what we call them I know that's a simple explanation there's so much more to say believer [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] well there's that if you found this video helpful in any way here's another video about mixing that you can go watch take care

Channel: Jon Meyer Music

Views: 34,389

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Id: ArVFXbmJ2zo

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023