5 Hot Tips for Creative Reverb Effects

Reverb can do much more than the traditional,
set-and-forget application that has served us well for decades. So, let’s look
at five techniques that create distinctive, innovative effects — while still
retaining reverb’s unique ability to wrap a gorgeous ambience around our
tracks.

Although the examples illustrate each application in the context of a specific DAW, these techniques translate to almost any DAW.

1. “Blooming” Reverb

This novel reverb effect doesn’t come on all at once
but “blooms” over time. It’s not like pre-delay because the reverb doesn’t
start after a certain amount of time. Instead, it rises up from nothing, then
blooms, and finally dissipates. It’s ideal for when you don’t want reverb to overpower
note attacks.

Insert two reverbs in parallel. Ableton Live can incorporate this in an Effect Rack (fig. 1), or Studio One in an FX Chain. With other DAWs, simply create a send to two buses, each with a reverb.Set the reverbs to processed sound only. Let the main audio track provide the dry sound.For one of the reverbs, invert the audio’s polarity.

Figure 1: The parallel reverb settings are the same — except that one has a phase (polarity) inverter, and one has a different decay time.

Due to the polarity inversion, the reverbs cancel when they have the same settings. However, the parameter values are not exactly the same — the decay times are different. At the start of the reverb decay, the two reverbs have much in common, so a lot of the signal cancels. As the decay progresses, the time difference between the reverbs increases, and the reverbs become less out of polarity. So, the reverb decay builds over time, which creates the blooming effect.




The first phrase goes through standard reverb, while the second phrase goes through the same reverb but with the “bloom” effect. In the second phrase, note how the reverb avoids obscuring note attacks.

2. Mid-side Reverb

Reverb is a fine candidate for mid-side processing. If
you’re not familiar with this technique, mid-side processing encodes a stereo
signal’s left and right channels into two components: the mid (the sum of the
left and right channel) and the sides (what the left and right channels don’t
have in common). You can then process the mid and sides in real time and follow
the processors with a decoder that converts the audio back to traditional
stereo. This stereo audio incorporates any mid-side processing that’s being
applied.

Increasing the reverb level
in only the sides gives signals more width and keeps reverb out of the “mud
zone” of bass and kick. Although a vocal panned to center won’t go through the
reverb when using this kind of technique, it’s not unusual to use a separate
reverb on the vocal anyway.

Pro Tools doesn’t have any native mid-side processors, but there’s an easy way to make any multimono processor work as a mid-side processor. Fig. 2 shows the setup for adding mid-side reverb to drums.

Figure 2: How to set up mid-side reverb processing in Pro Tools.

Create an Aux track for the reverb.Download the free MSED mid-side encoder/decoder from voxengo.com.Insert your reverb of choice (this example shows iZotope’s Neoverb). Set it for processed sound only and then insert an MSED before and after the reverb processor.Route a send from your drum track to the Aux track.Set the pre-reverb MSED for Encode mode.Set the post-reverb MSED for Decode mode.Fig. 2 shows the mid component turned down in the MSED Decoder so that reverb is only in the sides. The audio example uses this setting.

Being able to adjust the mid and sides separately may be all you want to do. But you can also adjust the reverb settings for the mid and sides separately, like having a longer decay time in the sides than in the mid. Unlink the two (the link button is circled in orange in fig. 2) then use the drop-down menu to choose the L (mid) or R (side) channel for editing.




The first half has a standard reverb sound. The second half applies reverb to only the sides. Although it sounds like the snare is a different sample in the second half, it isn’t — it just seems tighter because there’s no reverb applied to the mid.

3. The Onstage Reverb

Reverb sounds different when you’re onstage, especially in arenas and other big spaces. Whatever you’re playing is louder than the reflections coming back at you, so you hear the reverb mostly in the spaces between your playing. In the studio, we can emulate this effect and restrict reverb to the spaces between phrases. As a result, the reverb doesn’t “step on” your audio. All this technique requires is sidechaining and a processor that can do ducking, like an expander.

Insert two pre-fader sends in your instrument’s channel.Assign one send to an effects bus, with reverb set to processed sound only, and follow it with an expander.Assign the other send to the expander’s sidechain input. The reason for pre-fader sends is so that you can hear the differences among settings clearly by turning down the main fader while adjusting the effect parameters.Choose a long reverb time like five or six seconds. The length is important because, after the expander finishes ducking the reverb sound, you’ll still need plenty of reverb to fill in the spaces.

Figure 3: The left-hand side shows the track setup needed to create the onstage reverb effect in Studio One. The expander settings are on the right, with Ducking mode selected.

The expander’s Threshold parameter sets the amount of reverb attenuation when the instrument audio is present. The expander settings are fairly crucial, so you’ll need to experiment until you obtain the desired effect.




The first part plays the onstage effect — you can hear the reverb enter in between the guitar licks. For reference, the second part plays only the reverb, without the dry guitar track, so you can hear what the effect is doing.

4. Rhythmic Reverb Splashes

One of my favorite techniques is turning up a send to
the reverb to push something like a snare hit into the reverb for a big reverb
“splash.” But you can take this further by having splashes occur rhythmically
on instruments like keyboards, hand percussion, guitar, voice, and more.

Fig. 4 shows this set up in Guitar Rig 6 (which can create cool reverb effects internally), but the same principle works with DAWs that have step sequencer modulation sources (e.g., Studio One’s X-Trem).

Guitar Rig’s Split Mix module separates the input into two paths. Path A is the reverb effect chain, while path B is drums only. Path A has a volume module prior to the Raum reverb (set for processed sound only) and a step sequencer that controls the volume module’s gain. The step sequencer produces a pulse on the backbeats (2 and 4), so the volume module sends audio to the reverb only on beats 2 and 4.

Figure 4: Guitar Rig 6 is set up to do reverb “splashes” on the backbeats.

The audio example demonstrates how this sounds with drums, but triggering reverb rhythmically is effective with a wide variety of audio sources.




The audio example’s first half has audio processed by reverb without any kind of gating (i.e., the sound of traditional reverb). The second half has the same reverb settings but triggers the reverb only on 2 and 4. Note how the second half sounds so much tighter even though there’s the same reverb decay time. This is because the reverb tail happens only on 2 and 4.

5. Bi-amp Reverb

Some reverbs have crossover frequencies so you can
process the high and low frequencies differently. However, many don’t — and,
even with those that do, the high and low frequency sections may have several
common parameters. This places a limit on how much you can differentiate the
two sections.

The solution is simple — two
reverbs. Insert a lowpass filter in front of one and a highpass filter in front
of the other to create bi-amped reverb. With separate high and low reverb decay
times for drums, you can set up a tight kick ambience but let the hats and
cymbals fade out in a diaphanous haze... or have a huge kick that sounds
like it was recorded in a Gothic castle with tight snare and cymbals on top.

Also, with highly percussive
audio, sometimes more diffusion can give a smooth wash of sound instead of
hearing reflections as discrete echoes. Being able to set up different
diffusion for the high and low frequencies (as well as pre-delay and other
reverb parameters) makes it easy to tailor the sound for different frequency
ranges. Another advantage is that, with two individual reverbs, the low and
high frequencies don’t interact with each other in the process of being
reverberated.

Bi-amping is easy to do (fig. 5), and not just for reverbs — for example, this same bi-amping principle can work well with amp sims.

Figure 5: It’s easy to set up bi-amped reverb in MOTU’s Digital Performer by combining two MasterWorks EQs with two ProVerbs (only one is shown). Unused EQ stages are grayed out.

Create two buses, each with its own reverb, preceded by an EQ that can do highpass or lowpass filtering.Set one EQ to a 6dB/octave highpass filter with a frequency set around 700Hz.Set the other EQ to a 6dB/octave lowpass filter and choose the same frequency (i.e., 700Hz).For any track to which you want to add reverberation, add two sends. Assign one to the reverb with the highpass filter and the other to the reverb with the lowpass filter. Set the reverb for processed sound only.

Now you can tweak the reverbs themselves for the best sound and choose whether high, low, or both frequencies become reverberated. The audio example demos four different sounds.




Note that, with 6dB/octave slopes and the same cutoff
frequency for both filters, if you summed the two sends together and bypassed
the reverbs, they’d have a flat response. However, no law says that flat is
always good. You can use steeper slopes to differentiate the low and high
frequencies more — or alter the cutoff frequencies so that the highs and lows
overlap or are more separated. There are lots of possibilities.

But aren’t there always? Why be normal — try these different reverb approaches to embellish your mixes with new, and different, reverb effects.

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