Just Use Three Reverbs

Back in the good old days, when consoles were fourteen feet long and you had to wear headphones if you wanted to hear things in stereo at either end, you couldn't put a different reverb unit on every channel.

Actually, unless you had a console with dynamics on every channel, you had probably six or ten compressors total, and maybe two or four reverbs at the most.

Three reverbs. That is what I usually worked with. Two patches off a Lexicon 480L and maybe an actual plate reverb if the studio had one and it still worked—once digital reverbs came out, old mechanical plates and springs became dusty boxes down in the basement.

I also brought a reverb with me in one of my racks, an Alesis Midiverb 2. I loved that thing.

Anyway, enough going down memory lane, the point is many of your favorite records—many of the best records ever made—were mixed with one reverb unit, maybe two. Beatles albums generally had one reverb chamber on them and a tape delay.

We don't need a separate, different reverb on every channel, making our mixes gloppy and tasteless, like dumping a clot of ketchup, mayo, mustard, Hoisin sauce, Sambal Oelek, and Worcestershire sauce onto a perfectly delicious sandwich.

Let's be smart with our condiments. Let's taste the actual stuff in the sandwich.

Let's just use one reverb, instantiated three times, and on sends and returns, not inline on individual channels.

The first reverb is a small room. This 'verb brings things together and blends. The Micro Digital Reverberator has wonderful, natural-sounding small rooms. Machine 2 preset 02 Small and Bright, with decay time of 0.2 seconds, is a favorite. If it is a little too close-sounding, I put maybe 35ms of pre-delay on it to give it a tiny sense of slap. Return this into your mix in stereo.

You can apply Reverb 1 to many elements of the mix to pull them together and put them into the same room. This is especially useful if you're using drum samples and guitar modeling rather than real rooms and mics. A little on the snare and the drum overheads, a little on the backing vocals, a touch on the guitars and maybe some keyboard parts, will add a bit of commonality to your mix and pull it together into a common space. You don't need to crank this up: even small, quiet amounts of reverb can psychoacoustically affect the listener, add realism, and, dare I use an overused term, glue.

Reverb 2 is the attention getter: MDR Machine 1 preset 4, which is a medium, bright plate reverb.

Plates are dense and slightly artificial-sounding, and they tend to "catch" our ears. While Reverb 1 blends things, Reverb 2 pops things out. Use Reverb 2 to bring out the lead vocal, perhaps the snare, or anything that needs a little bit of extra attention from the listener.

Not everything in a mix deserves all of our attention. We want to lead our listening in, and direct them to hear what we, the mixer, decide is important. Democracies don't produce good mixes. Be a benevolent despot or a film director when you mix.

Reverb 3 is for emphasis and effect. Something huge, deep and dark. I like Machine 2 preset 25 large warm with a decay time of 2.8 seconds. This is a chamber sounding preset. It's way long and big. There's a couple of ways you can use it.

You can feed things into it very very slightly—a tiny touch on vocals and drums, or really anything. This reverb hangs back in the mix, barely there, but it adds a front-to-back distance to things. Sometimes I set it so it can only be noticed when the mix thins out, during breaks and bridges, as an example.

There are many uses for Reverb 3. Have it in the mix during verses, and then mute it for the choruses, which subtly differentiates these parts from each other. Automate the lead vocal's send to it, varying the reverb on the lead vocal depending on the emotions or the density of the lyrics. Crank it up a bit to emphasize a note, turn it all the way down, and also Reverb 1, to dry the lead vocal up for an in-your-face vibe.

Crank up Reverb 3 to increase the sustain of notes—this is especially effective at the ending of solos.

Automate sending to Reverb 3 to add something special to every other snare hit. Better yet, add another snare track, remove every other snare hit, send that to the reverb and then take the second snare out of the mix. Less automation!

Actually, since I hate automating things, I do this all the time. If I want to add reverb, or delay, on say, a vocal, I make a copy of the vocal snippet that I want to echo and put it on its own track, and then add reverb to that. No automation.

One last fun thing to do. Use this reverb to fade away, not fade out.

If you're doing a fade out, automate the master fader to execute the fade, and then dump the reverb as the fade starts. Dump as in turn it way up, either by cranking the sends or pushing up the return, or do both. The result sounds more like things are going away than getting quiet. Distance is a more interesting thing than volume changes.

A last trick: press the Korneff Nameplate to flip Reverb 1 around to the back. Find the width control and turn it up (clockwise) a bit to push the reverb'd signals out beyond the speakers a bit. This gives extended space around the entire mix.