GOGO Music Label Page with Pumlani Mafika.

August 1 at 11:25am · 

Producer's Monday (21)
Ralf GUM

Reverb

A dry mix will sound 1 dimensional and therefore reverb is essential to give room to a track. A basic rule is that sounds in the background would get more reverb than sounds in the forefront, however and with reverb I find it ok to break rules sometimes, as the possibilities with them are endless. Basically we could mix with 2 or 3 reverbs. One longer reverb (2-3 seconds) which is used on pretty much all sound and which I’d call the “main reverb”. Then one smaller room, which you'd use on drums, e.g. the snare. I find that small plates are nice on drums in general and work well to fuse drum & percussion sounds together. And you’d probably need a 3rd one, to use on vocals (or solos) only, maybe in combination with a bit of the other two reverbs, mainly the “main reverb”. These 3 reverbs will enable you to create some decent dimension in a mix already. However once getting deeper into the subject, there are countless more possibilities and for me actually the necessity of many more reverb sends and returns. First of all a “reverb” can be a combination of multiple reverbs together to achieve more density and/or a room-impression that suits the track. Don’t be scared using several different types and lengths of reverbs (plates, chambers, concert halls, etc) and combine them to use it as your one “main reverb”. In my opinion some reverbs, especially plug-ins, tend to become messy, if you run all your sounds thru one unit. So once I found my “main reverb” (which can be those several reverbs combined), I want to have it multiple times. And this for some reasons. The colour of a reverb is dependent on the sound source and you might want to EQ the reverb different for different sounds. You can tweak the colour of a reverb towards or contrasting it’s source. For example you have a sharp sound, but want his reverb to be unobtrusive nevertheless, you can take out sharp frequencies from his reverb only. This only can only be done if the reverb channel is exclusively for this sound. You might want to do the opposite on another sound and so forth. There’s another advantage using designated reverb sends on single sources: Once you mute the sound the reverb will be gone too, while reverb feed from the other sources, stays audible. Important sounds in my mix might all use the same “main reverb”, but often with differently EQ-ed reverb channels. Taking away bass or using a low cut on some of the reverb sends helps cleaning up the mix, but don’t overdo it. So we already need the “main reverb” several times on different reverb sends and returns. If something should stand out of the lot of instruments, I might give it an own different room, again probably combined with a bit of the main reverb. However you can use reverb for more. I like a balanced panorama in my mixes. If I pan a certain instrument to achieve panorama, I’d like to have a counterpart on the other side. Ideally this counterpart plays in a similar frequency spectrum and similar volume. But sometimes a composition does not include an instrument which can function as that counterpart. So if you (for example) work with only 1 synth sound and you don’t want to leave it in the centre of your mix, your stereo expander does not do what you want and there’s really nothing which can complement it on the other side of the stereo image, pan it hard nevertheless and use a small reverb / room which you fully pan to the other side. It can help you keeping some stereo balance. Advantage of several reverbs is furthermore that you now can compress reverbs on individual sources. Compression on reverbs works often great. Due to the individual reverb sends you‘re now able to compress only those reverbs where you do like the effect, e.g. only the vocal reverb or only on the reverbs of certain instruments. And you can do more: imagine a sidechain compressor feed by a drum pattern to achieve rhythmical patterns in the reverb tail. The possibilities are endless. Ideally we would do this with a bunch of Bricasti M7 Reverbs, the state of art studio reverb, but are not able to afford it. Use an Impulse Reverb with some good impulses loaded into it