Estimated reading time 3 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you need to know what reverb is? Want to know how to use it in a mix? Understanding what reverb is and how to use it effectively is critical for creating a good mix. Keep reading How to Master Reverb (3 Tips to Tweak Your Mix) to learn what it is and how it works.
This article uses musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
How to Master Reverb (3 Tips to Tweak Your Mix): What Reverb Type Do I Use?
What is reverb?
- It’s that airy sound you get when sound reflects off the walls of a room.
- Combined with panning, it gives a mix a feeling of space.
- To do this you must first select from a list in the type-of-reverb setting.
You’ll find that your effects unit has options like:
- Large hall
- Small hall
- Room
- Plate
- Gated
These settings give you the characteristics of these different room sizes.
- A hall setting will sound large and echoey and a room setting will sound smaller, giving you a tight sound.
- A plate setting sounds like the old-fashioned recording studio plate reverb.
- Gated reverb is usually used on the snare drum to create the Phil Collins sound.
How do you know which one to use?
- Singers sound good with a room or plate reverb.
- Conversely, glam metal drums sound good with the hall setting.
- Funk style drums and most other pop and orchestral instruments sound good with room reverb.
However, don’t put reverb on the bass guitar or the bass drum.
How to Master Reverb (3 Tips to Tweak Your Mix): What Is Pre-Delay and Decay Time?
Pre-delay determines when the effect comes in.
- In other words, the dry track plays while the reverb is slightly delayed.
- A good pre-delay for vocals falls around 20 to 50 milliseconds (ms).
- A millisecond is 1/1000 of a second, so it’s a very short time interval.
- This means that you’re not going to hear the difference between the start of the dry signal and the onset of the effect when it’s 20 and 50 ms.
- However, longer than 50 ms creates a noticeable echo.
Decay time measures how long the effect lasts.
- People perceive long decay times as sounding wet and short decay times as sounding dry.
- A longer decay time is useful if you want the huge “wall of sound” kind of mix.
- However, you must be careful, or it will make your mix sound cluttered.
- Conversely, short decay times will give you a tight sound.
Which way you go depends on the style of the music and what sound you want.
How to Master Reverb (3 Tips to Tweak Your Mix): Panning and Volume
On many mixing boards, you can pan the reverb separately from the original dry track.
- For example, if you pan your dry guitar signal 45o left and the effect 30o right, that stretches the sound across the speakers.
- This works well for distorted guitars, keyboards, and backing vocals.
- Stretched sounds are a key component of the wall-of-sound style of mix.
Also, you can adjust the volume of the effect independently of the original sound.
- Reducing the effects volume means that you can make the part sound very dry.
- Alternatively, increasing the effects volume will make it sound wet.
- For example, increasing the volume of the effect while attenuating the volume of a dry guitar track will make it sound like you’re soloing in the distance.
- You can enhance this effect by panning it to the left.
- However, if you have a very low effect volume, you can make vocal tracks sound like the singer is whispering in your ear,
If you’re using an external effects unit, you’ll have to insert it into the mixing board.
Video: The Art of Mixing
Final Thoughts
Takeaway points:
- What is reverb? It’s that airy sound you get from sounds reflecting off the walls of a room.
- Singers will sound good with a small room or plate reverb.
- Don’t put reverb on bass guitar or the bass drum.
- Gated reverb is usually used on the snare drum to give the Phil Collins sound.
- On many mixing boards, you can adjust the effect volume and pan separately from the original dry track.
Related Posts
- Writing Well Crafted Songs
- How to Employ Effective Equalization on Your Song
- What’s Dynamic Range Compression and How to Use It
© 2025 Geoffrey Keith
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