How do deal with reverb when you don't want it?

reverb on everything? what? i make 80's pop and not even i put reverb on everything.

  On 5/6/2010 at 6:58 AM, ieafs said:

 

 

two hard panned versions of the same thing - adds a fake kind of depth without taking over everything

I always thought this was the same thing as setting one sound to 'pan center', but I take it it's not?

i will give some serious advice: get to know reverb. spend a few days fucking around with all the various types, get to know them. see which ones catch your fancy. try them on all sorts of noises, learn what works and what you like. after that, not only will you know how to use reverb properly, but you'll have the confidence to tell some windbag to cram it when they give you some bullshit blanket assertion about reverb.

  On 5/6/2010 at 1:41 PM, data said:

reverb on everything? what? i make 80's pop and not even i put reverb on everything.

lol

/thread

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

  On 5/6/2010 at 4:53 PM, Lube Saibot said:

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

Truth ^ new monoloake album created using NO compression.

I'll meet you guys outside his house. I'll supply the torches, but you have to bring your own pitchforks.

  On 5/6/2010 at 4:53 PM, Lube Saibot said:

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

Thanks Captain Obvious!

*Jots it down*

  On 5/6/2010 at 5:59 PM, hautlle said:

  On 5/6/2010 at 4:53 PM, Lube Saibot said:

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

 

Truth ^ new monoloake album created using NO compression.

 

I'll meet you guys outside his house. I'll supply the torches, but you have to bring your own pitchforks.

To be fair, it should be mentioned that Monolake says:

  Quote

There’s of course a third interesting part of the story and this is how to use compression in a mix. I realize that my non compression approach has its disadvantages; playing this CD on a cheap stereo is not rewarding. The same goes for most headphones. In this regard, my decision was quite elitist. I wanted it to sound good on a good stereo.

  Quote

I have actually never listened to it with headphones. I know that I should, just to make sure it works with all those millions of mp3 players out there, but I simply didn’t. I don’t even know why I never took care of it. I guess I just trusted my speaker setup in the studio.

  Quote

*Q7. Will you be continuing a gar kein compression approach or was this a one-off experiment/statement? i know I’m using less already..

 

Robert: As a general strategy, for sure. As a dogma: no.

http://www.carosnatch.com/2010/02/monolake-interview-producing-an-album-with-no-compression/

This thread (title and content) kinda proves that it isn't as obvious as one would expect.

Jot that down.

  On 5/6/2010 at 6:13 PM, scones to die for said:

  On 5/6/2010 at 5:59 PM, hautlle said:

  On 5/6/2010 at 4:53 PM, Lube Saibot said:

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

 

Truth ^ new monoloake album created using NO compression.

 

I'll meet you guys outside his house. I'll supply the torches, but you have to bring your own pitchforks.

To be fair, it should be mentioned that Monolake says:

 

  Quote

There’s of course a third interesting part of the story and this is how to use compression in a mix. I realize that my non compression approach has its disadvantages; playing this CD on a cheap stereo is not rewarding. The same goes for most headphones. In this regard, my decision was quite elitist. I wanted it to sound good on a good stereo.

 

  Quote

I have actually never listened to it with headphones. I know that I should, just to make sure it works with all those millions of mp3 players out there, but I simply didn’t. I don’t even know why I never took care of it. I guess I just trusted my speaker setup in the studio.

 

  Quote

*Q7. Will you be continuing a gar kein compression approach or was this a one-off experiment/statement? i know I’m using less already..

 

Robert: As a general strategy, for sure. As a dogma: no.

 

http://www.carosnatch.com/2010/02/monolake-interview-producing-an-album-with-no-compression/

I've read that interview, it's a good one. Those quotes kinda show my point though. He hasn't listened to it on headphones, doesn't care. He got it to sound the way he wanted it to, without concern for the audience. It's your own music, do whatever you want with it. I don't understand the OP... If you don't like reverb, then don't use it. Who cares if everyone else says it's shite as long as you like it? Who are you making your music for?

Somebody got me wrong. Probably my bad because I said it wrong. Of course I'm not going to use reverb on everything if it not sounds good.

  On 5/6/2010 at 4:53 PM, Lube Saibot said:

I'm not going to disrupt this facepalm storm beyond saying: I always find it funny when somebody declares "it is professional to put [insert any sort of DSP here] on everything"... i mean for fuck's sake, you don't even need COMPRESSION or EQ on everything. Use your fucking ears and common sense and ignore all platitudes and false truisms.

Man, how much time would it take to you to learn what is compressor and how to use it, just with your fucking ears, if you wouldn't know anything about it? I didn't say there are rules and I'm not asking for rules. I'm just asking for guidelines. I got some really good answers and they helped me. Thanks "scones to die for" and others.

buy a bank. record in vaults.

guys op is sean booth

Mix your tracks so they sound like you want them to. Then listen to them on various headphones and stereo setups. If they sound good you are done. Great work!

GET RID OF THE 'VERB, HE DOESN'T WANT IT

wrecked by reverberation

I am just a random dude and not anyone important, but I hate reverb. In fact back in the day I wrote a pretty solid track called "I Hate Reverb" and it and many of my other tracks never involve reverb at all.

It really depends on what kind of music you want to make, and what kind of equipment you have at your disposal.

"Reverb on everything" is definitely stupid as a rule, but it's much more plausible if you're recording or mixing a bunch of acoustic instruments together, like a folky pop band or something. But as a rule that makes basically no sense at all for electronic music.

I make electronic music with a good mixture of synthesized and synthetic sounds (ie. synths and drum machines) as well as sampled sounds. If you grab a break from a funk record or a piano loop from Sergio Mendes, it's already been mixed most likely with some room on it so fuck it, just start jamming with it.

If you want to throw your drum machine track or something through some verb as an effect, do it up. But personally I have had ZERO SUCCESS "tying everything together" using plugin reverbs like people sometimes say. I mainly desire clarity in the mix and to me most reverb plugs fuck with the clarity without doing any sort of "tying" at all.

I have noticed that hardware reverbs are somewhat different in this respect, even cheap ones. That's just my experience, although I realize it may be different to explain why that would be the case. But I've had some minor success with reverb helping the "natural" feel of a sound when using my Lexicon Alex as well as the reverb section of my MPC effects board. To my ears those hardware reverbs can do their thing without excessively gumming up the mix in the middle in a gross way.

The only reverb plugin I like is the mono verb section of e-phonic Retrodelay. Oh and the new PT LE spring reverb plugin in pretty fun. Just an opinion.

EDIT: Oh, and do stuff with your reverb returns. I like to get all Beatles-y sometimes and pan basically the whole return on a clap hard left or right (it's important to test this on speakers & headphones since the perception of hard-panned sounds is so different there). Also don't be afraid to mono-up your return either all the way or some percentage (the mix gets less gummy if you narrow the field on the reverb return, I find). Either that or you can do the opposite and crank up the S on the return with leaves you more room for snappy drums and bass in the middle. Basically keep in mind that designers of reverbs (particularly plugins) always err on the side of their algorithm sounding like HOLY FUCK IT'S A LOT OF REVERB WOWOWOWOW because they want it to be not-subtle. You may not want the entire stereo field to be like OMG IT'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR FRUITY REVERB LOOK AT ALL THIS SPACE WOWWWWWWWWWW

if its "realism" you want then start listening to how things sound in various natural spaces out there beyond the CPU and either record in places you find have the most pleasing verbs or try to emulate this in a computer. its been said before, however, that making a truly realistic verb on a computer is well impossible...something about maths

who do returns do? sorry for the noob question i've been only been told that "oh you don't wanna mess with them".

  On 5/14/2010 at 8:35 PM, GORDO said:

who do returns do? sorry for the noob question i've been only been told that "oh you don't wanna mess with them".

Normally on mixing desks (and in most DAWs nowadays too) there are two ways to apply an effect to a signal.

First you can route the entire signal to the effect, eg, have a synth line go through a flanger. This is called an "insert" as you are inserting the signal into the effect.

The second way is to take a bit of the signal and send it to an effect and have that bit come back into the main mix, via the "return". For example, say your snare drum was playing, you send a copy of the signal to a reverb effect, and then the audio from the reverb effect is returned to the mix. So you're mixing the original snare with the reverb sound. (your reverb effect in this case would be set to 100% wet normally).

You can raise and lower the volume of the return to make it sound different.

yeah but there's a send knob and a return knob. so i guess they do the same thing only one is pre effect and the other is post effect?

Well basically a reverb works like this:

dry signal -> [reverb that shit] -> wet signal -> mix wet and dry back together some amount

The reverbating sums your input signal down to mono (usually), and then passes it through a network of delays and filters to create overlapping, de-correlated echoes that are really close together. Those = reverb

I mean, more or less.

Part of the reverbating process is to stereo-ize your input signal back to stereo. This is why you can use a reverb affect in a mono-to-stereo role (and why most of them, even when working in stereo-to-stereo contexts, still sum the input signal to mono before feeding it to the reverb algorithm).

So literally what they are doing is jiggling some shit around randomly to basically ensure that the left and right channels of the wet signal are different. It's basically random in most cases. So what that means is that depending on the algorithm, the wet signal from a reverb (either returning via a return track or just mixed back in using the plug's interface) is VERY stereo.

You may not want that. You may find that it sounds better if you chill out the stereo-ness of that wet signal maybe a little bit, or even reduce it down nearly to mono. In my experience, a very stereo return sounds like "zomg i am trying to be realistic and maybe failing or maybe not" and a very mono return sounds like "check it out, here's a REVERB EFFECT!!!"

2¢ YMMV etc.

  On 5/15/2010 at 12:21 AM, GORDO said:

yeah but there's a send knob and a return knob. so i guess they do the same thing only one is pre effect and the other is post effect?

Kind of, the send is the volume you are sending out to the reverb, the return is the volume you are playing back the reverb effect thats coming back from the box.

If you want to put some reverb on something then plug in your device and use the send knob to give enough signal to get the desired effect from the box. Normally this is just making sure the effect is getting a good strong signal nothing too quiet and not so loud as to overload the fx box's input.

Once thats set it will normally stay set like that. Then you use the return knob to adjust how much of it you want in the mix. Your send will often be up high even though you only want a tiny amount in the mix (ie your return is low), this is just good practice, you only turn things down at the last stage where possible.

On a desk its worth noting that the sends and returns are not really linked unless you plug them in like that. Sends are often used send audio to a musicians headphones while he records, in this case the returns are not used. Returns could thoeretically have anything you want plugged into them, they are just extra inputs on a desk with less options than a normal channel.

If you have a desk big enough (like in a DAW) then the returns can be effected as well. If you want to trash things up you can add distortion to your reverb return, or chorus is another favourite. If you are sending to a delay unit then you can (on the return channel) send a bit of the signal BACK to the delay, creating infinite feedback loops and all sorts of crazy stuff that can sound really great!