Reverb... It's All About Timing.

Hello, Hellooo, Hellooooooo

 When it comes to using reverb a lot of mix engineers will give it a wide birth claiming they just can't get it to work for them and for many that is indeed the case. But despite an ever growing repugnance of reverb in favour of delay it still has it's place in the mix.
 So I want to re-address this dislike for reverb and show how it can be a great tool for any mix there's just a few things to understand first as to how to get the best out of it.

What is Reverb?

Think of it this way, in it's basic form it's just and echo. Imagine standing in a cave and shouting "Hello!" You hear all the reflections of the cave walls making your voice sound bigger as it tails away to nothing. Or have you ever stripped a room out in your house for decorating and suddenly you hear the echo and space in the room? That essentially is reverb, it's the reflection of the sound in a room. The less in a room the more reflections, the more in a room (furniture, people) the less reflection as they dampen the sound. So now you have a real world example of what reverb is now you can utilise that knowledge when using reverb in a mix.

The difference between delay and reverb is that reverb is generally real world rooms and spaces.

Types of Reverb

HALL: A hall is a large space either in length or height that has a long decay time and lots of reflections. Classically used on John Bonham's drums where they used the height of the hall and staircase to create the massive drum reverb sound loved by many. 

ROOM: A room is a much smaller space that can be dead or reflective, depending upon the material

that the walls, floor, and ceiling are made of or the amount of items in the room. It usually has a short decay time of about 1.5 seconds or less. This is the most useful of all reverbs especially if the band didn't get tracked playing live in the studio all at the same time. It can be of great benefit to recreate that by using a room reverb and sending all the instruments and vocals into the FX channel, adjusting the volume of each send to mimic the live band feeling.

CHAMBER: An acoustic chamber is a dedicated tiled room that many large studios used to build to

create reverb. Famous examples are the ones created by Phil Spector 'Wall of sound' at Gold Star Studios, sadly now gone and others like the one at Capitol designed by Les Paul revered by many mix engineers. Extremely expensive to build hence their scarcity but the bedroom producer can mimic it somewhat on a lesser scale utilising a tiled bathroom for instance. Sound was usually passed through a loud speaker and then a microphone would pick it up again, including the effects of reverb. Although this is still common the cons with this technique is that varying the reverb time can be more difficult. A chamber is usually a smaller physical space than a hall that results in more clarity

PLATE: Introduced as a cheaper alternative to building a chamber and the first artificially created reverb, is literally a 250kg, 4x6ft, hanging plate of sheet metal with transducers attached to it.  Early units had one pickup for mono output, later models featured two pickups for stereo use. The reverb time can be adjusted by a damping pad, made from framed acoustic tiles. The closer the damping pad, the shorter the reverb time. However, the pad never touches the plate. Some units also featured a remote control. The most famous of these was the EMT140 made famous by Abbey Road studios.

NON-LINEAR: Again another artificially created reverb and solely available on digital reverb units. The pros of these reverbs, such as the infamous AMS RMX16, is that they could create reverbs that just were not possible in the real world. They also allow for special effects such as the reverb tail being reversed so it builds instead of decaying. This gives them an advantage over their real world counterparts in that they can really produce some otherwise unobtainable special FX's.

So hall, room and chamber are all real world rooms whilst plate and non-linear are, like delay, artificial. When it comes to choosing which reverb to use well there are no rules but in general, room or a chamber on drums, a plate on vocals or guitars, and a hall on strings or keyboards are the most common choices.

It's All About Timing

Slapping a reverb effect on anything without addressing the timing is pure folly. You need to specify the matching time of the reverb to correspond with the beats per minute of your track. This will help them blend in better in the mix and sound more natural.
 Working out the timing of a reverb or a delay for that matter can seem daunting but fear not there are lots of lovely people who have offered calculators online such as Nick Favour that take all the hardwork out for you.
 For the more inquisitive a manual way of setting up timing is to send the snare to a reverb Aux/Fx channel. Solo the Aux/Fx channel and adjust the decay/release time on the reverb plugin/hardware unit. What you are aiming for is after the initial first hit of the snare, listen for the reverb as it decays and drops in volume. Now lower/raise the decay or release time of your reverb until the tail decay just about stops before the second hit of the snare sounds. Now your good to go.

The Importance Of Pre-Delay

Another feature of reverbs not to be ignored is the Pre-Delay control. Pre-delay means delaying the sound of the reverb slightly after you hear the source signal. So the direct snare sounds first and then shortly after that the reverb. The reason it’s used is so the source signal doesn’t sound washed out in ambience. With a little bit of pre-delay, you’ll hear the source’s attack, then the reverb, so the source signal has more definition. A good starting point is around 20ms maybe up to 40ms somewhere in that region. When setting up, pre-delay, is more important to the overall effect of reverb as it is the one thing that will blend and create a natural effect in the overall mix.

Conclusion

So reverb can be of great benefit to your mix when you gain an understanding of what reverb is, how to crucially set it's timing and how using Eq can shape it to suit. Watch the video below as I endeavour to show some of these ideas and how to implement them.