Twentyfrets wrote:
I’ve been tryin’ to get these vocals for a song I threw down a couple weeks back
to sound a little more dreamy, but not extremely.. I want the reverb to come
thru, but not muttle the words, which happens sometimes for me. And then it
comes down to the mixture between the reverb on the guitars and the vocals
mixing too much and making it sound strange. Any ideas?

Thanks for writing in!  My first point would be that reverb is a tricky thing when you’re beginning to learn your way around mixing – this really has to do with the fact that reverb itself is a pretty complex phenomenon.  In any given space with any given sound, there are reflections and diffusions of that sound.  The reflections that arrive at the same listening point as the original sound at a later time basically make up your reverb (I’m oversimplifying but the basic understanding holds).

For example, say you’re in an average size bedroom – mostly square and not too big.  if you stand in the center of the room and speak you’ll hear yourself talking, and possibly slight “echos” of yourself.  Those echos are just your words bouncing off walls and furniture and coming back to your ears slightly delayed from the orginal sound.  That in a nutshell is how reverb devices work.  They find ways of duplicating, delaying, and processing (like Eq) the original sound to make it SEEM like the sound was made in a different physical space.

Now, that’s not how a lot of people use reverbs nowadays.  A lot of reverb isn’t about sounding natural, but about sounding “full” or “lush” or “larger than life.” I think the key to successful using reverbs comes from your understanding of what kind of sound you’re looking for, and then translating that into some sort of imaginary space.

Think of some old Led Zepplin recordings – the reverbs on the vocals especially tended to have an epic Arena-sized reverb.  Compare that to some of the shoegazer bands like Slowdive.  Their reverbs were often a kind of hazy glue that kept all the instruments sounding like one big wave of sound.  In there case it sounds like reverbs cascading into reverbs and delays and all sorts of exxtra processing.

In short, there is a lot to how reverbs work, and a LOT of things you can do with them if you’re not afraid to experiment.

But getting more specific to your question, I’d said you probably aren’t using a great reverb if you’re constantly battling between the verb not being audible enough and the vocals getting muddled.  Reverbs, like guitars have a wide range of sophistication and costs, and usually you get what you pay for.  BUT, thankfully, there are some tricks you can use that can get you a little more mileage out of your reverbs.

First Thing I do when setting up a reverb (and I always use and FX bus for this) is get the “Mix” or “Wet/Dry” control set to 100% or All Wet.  This removes any of the original sound from the output of the reverb and lets me hear and judge just the reverb effect.  If you leave some of the original sound in, it’s not wrong, you just end up fighting yourself in the mix.  It is a lot easier to use the faders on your track and bus to balance the reverb out than it is to open the plugin and fiddle with a knob.

The next thing to do, if you’re not too sure what all the controls do, is focus on getting the reverb as long or short as you want it.  That generally refers to thing like length, time, delay time, room size, seconds, milliseconds (ms), etc. These kinds of controls tend to correlate to the physical size of your imaginary space.

If you’ve got a control like Pre-delay, then that tends to add a set-time pause between the orginal sound and the beginning of the reverb.  This lets you mimic early reflections which are a vital part of how we interpret distance in and space with hearing.  For the non-physicist, I like to think of it as how far away the source is from the first reflective surface.  If you were in an arena the first reflections you hear might be so far delayed that they sound like an echo. Practically speaking if you’re finding you’ve got too much or too little of a “echo” or “delay” happening in your reverbs, then try tweaking this control.

The last thing I’d say for just getting your feet wet with reverb is EQ those things.  A lot of cheaper reverbs get muddy in the frequency range right where your vocals sit, and they often try to process extreme highs and lows that you make them sound unnatural.  I always stick an EQ in front of and behind the reverb plugin on the bus I’m working with.

The pre-EQ is all filters – high pass up to 100-400 HZ to get rid of “bass reflections” that can blur my timing and phase-cancel important tracks. Sometimes I low-pass down to 12-17 kHz if I’m getting strange shimmers or “air” that doesn’t sound good.

The Post-EQ is all about cutting away at the parts of the reverb that muddle your tracks.  I often start with a big mid-range scoop out of the reverb and then  and then move it around until I find a spot that lets my vocals be clear while still having a nice long trailing reverb.

Here’s a little video on how I usually setup my reverbs.

The video might take a while for Vimeo to process, but it will up soon, I promise.

4 Responses to “Mix Monday: Q & A Vocal Reverb”