Reverb is one of the most powerful tools in a sound engineer's arsenal. It can breathe life into a flat recording, give space to vocals, and provide depth to instruments. In this article, we will walk you through the main steps to expertly add reverb to your mix, ensuring a balanced, polished, and professional sound. Let’s start with the basics.

Understanding Reverb

Before diving into the technicalities, it's essential to understand what reverb is and how it can affect your mix.

Reverb, short for reverberation, is the reflection of sound waves from surfaces. In a musical context, it creates an ambiance, simulating the sound of various spaces, be it a small room or a large hall.

Why Add Reverb?

Depth and Dimension: Reverb can provide depth and dimension to your tracks, placing instruments in a 3D sonic landscape.
Blending Elements: It helps blend various elements of a mix, ensuring that everything feels cohesive and connected.
Emotional Impact: Depending on its type and amount, reverb can evoke emotions ranging from intimacy to grandeur.

Key Considerations Before Applying Reverb

1. Choose the Right Type of Reverb

Different reverbs replicate different spaces. Understand the mood and atmosphere you want to convey:

Room: Creates a tight ambiance and is ideal for a more intimate sound. Introduced in the earliest days of recording, room reverb was the natural ambiance of a space captured during a live recording. Before analogue or digital reverb units, engineers would experiment with different rooms and microphone placements to achieve the desired ambiance.

Creates an intimate setting.
Emulates smaller spaces like rooms or studios.
Helps in achieving a natural and organic sound.

Hall: Offers a larger and more expansive sound, suited for orchestral or choir recordings. Hall reverbs replicate the grand acoustic environments found in concert halls and cathedrals. As studios moved towards more controlled environments, there was a need to artificially recreate this expansive ambiance, giving rise to hall reverb units.

Suited for orchestral or choir recordings.
Conveys a sense of grandeur and expansiveness.
Evokes the feel of vast architectural spaces.

Certain historic artificial reverbs still exist in modern reverb units:

Plate: Replicates the sound of large, metallic plates. It's rich and dense, suitable for vocals and drums. Introduced in the 1950s, plate reverbs were a groundbreaking technology. Sound was sent to a large metal plate, causing it to vibrate. These vibrations were then captured by a pickup, creating a lush and unique reverb sound.

Rich, dense reverb.
Popular for vocals and drums due to its unique tonal quality.
Often found in vintage recording studios.

Spring: Simulates the spring reverb found in vintage amps, making it perfect for electric guitars. Spring reverb made its debut in the 1960s, mainly in guitar amplifiers. It utilized springs to generate reverberations. When a sound was introduced, it caused the springs to vibrate, which was then picked up and transformed into a wet signal.

Twangy and splashy reverb sound.
Closely associated with surf guitar tones and vintage electric guitars.
Found in many classic guitar amplifiers.

Reverbs are produced through various technologies and can be found in both hardware and software formats. Classic hardware, like Plate or Spring reverbs, are often analog and carry a nostalgic tone reminiscent of a golden age in audio evolution. Digital hardware units, which usually come at a higher price compared to plugins, predominantly employ algorithmic reverbs. While these algorithmic reverbs boast efficiency and adaptability, they sometimes compromise on authenticity, making it challenging to pinpoint the optimal mix setting. Meanwhile, convolution reverbs demand greater computational resources but have the potential to offer authenticity.

Convolution reverbs: Emerging in the digital age, convolution reverbs were introduced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They utilize digital samples (called "impulse responses") of real spaces or even hardware reverbs. These precision samples are then convolved with the input signal, replicating the acoustics of the sampled space.

Highly realistic and detailed.
Can replicate specific spaces, from famous studios to landmark cathedrals.
Gives the mix a lifelike depth and dimension.

2. Add reverb to your mix gradually

Remember, the goal is to enhance, not overpower. Start with a small amount of reverb and gradually increase until it feels right under different listening conditions (sound level, equipment).

Step-by-Step Guide to Adding Reverb to Your Mix

Select a Track: Choose the track you want to apply reverb to. It could be vocals, guitar, drums, or any other instrument.
Insert a Reverb Plugin: Many Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are equipped with integrated reverb plugins. While they might not always align with your specific requirements, apply the preferred plugin to the designated track. For advanced reverb applications and realistic sound, consider utilizing our Inspirata plugin.
Choose a Preset: If you're unsure about settings, start with a preset that closely matches your desired sound and tweak from there.
Adjust Parameters, Finalize and Test:

Decay or Reverb Time: Dictates how long the reverb lasts. Longer decay times simulate larger spaces. Consider that the first part of the reverb – the early reflections – are the most important aspect in reverberation.
Pre-delay: The time before the reverb starts after the original sound. By adjusting it you have a very basic control on the clarity of the sound especially useful when handing vocals.
Damping: Controls the brightness or darkness of the reverb tail. This control is typically available in artificial or algorithmic reverb units. It replicates the effect of adding more sound absorption to the room effective at higher frequencies.
Wet/Dry Mix: Dictates the balance between the dry and wet (processed) signal. Sometimes ‘dry’ is used as a synonym for unprocessed sound, but this is an oversimplification as many reverbs like Inspirata treats the dry signal as the non-reverberating part, or direct sound, in the room. You can use the direct signal for adjusting the positioning and depth without introducing reverb. In other reverb units the dry signal is simply the unprocessed sound.

Adjusting your reverb, such as applying EQ to your reverb can prevent muddiness. For instance, cutting low frequencies can help keep the mix clear. But adding EQ to your reverb is a very basic way of dealing with the sound, a more preferred method is to change the reverberation time at certain frequencies where you would otherwise use EQ. This will not affect your dry/direct sound and will help you avoid unwanted side-effects when applying EQs. As a final step, always listen to the reverb in the context of the whole mix to ensure it complements other elements.

Conclusion

Incorporating reverb into your mix, when done correctly, can transform your recordings from amateur to professional, or from unpleasant to desirable. It's an art as much as a science, and with practice, you'll find the perfect balance to make your tracks shine. Whether you're aiming for a subtle ambiance or a grand sonic landscape, reverb is a critical tool to master. We hope this guide serves as a robust starting point in your journey to impeccable sound mixing – with Inspirata.