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Frank Stearns Frank Stearns is offline
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Default 1st Project Lessons Learned--So Far

(Don Pearce) writes:

snips

One more for you. When you are convinced you have the perfect amount
of reverb, halve it.


Yes and no.

MP3s will often mess up reverb (killing pretty tails and making reverb sound
stunted -- or sometimes nearly deleting it completely).

Some listening environments will do the same -- OR, they'll make reverb MORE
apparent because terrible things are happening to the center of the image, leaving
more L-minus-R than there really should be.

Some added suggestions:

1. Do a reverb check with multiple monitoring environments, including headphones.

2. Figure out how much reverb you really want, but then build it by using LESS from
two or MORE separate instances of reverb, both parallel but also on occasion serial.
Don't try to make one reverb instance do all the work, especially in the digital
world.

3. Think MUSICALLY about the reverb. Don's complaint is well-founded when the reverb
color and "feel" simply does not blend, go with, or sound natural with, the source
material. OTHO, when it *does* blend appropriately, you can use quite a bit
(assuming "wet" is appropriate for the music).

There's no formula for this -- you either hear what I'm talking about or you don't.

Some good practice, though, is to attend live acoustic events (UNAMPLIFIED) in a
really good acoustic space. PAY ATTENTION to what the room is sounding like; listen
to how the natural room sound is (hopefully) adding to the MUSIC. And, if you can,
move around the space; listen to how things change as you move in and out of the
near and far fields.

4. Dissect your reverb and the settings you might have for it -- of course the
reverb time, but also pre-delay, direct delays, near and far field delays, HF and LF
EQ and damping, density, etc, etc. See how adjusting those can help (or hurt) your
reverb sound.

And just because you get a good reverb sound on one project does not mean it will be
ideal for some other project.

There's a great deal more to reverb than just turning up (or down) a reverb send and
hoping for the best.

Frank
Mobile Audio

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