Reverb

Reverb is one of the four pillars of a record#

Think of the high-end studios of the eighties and nineties. What did every one of them put on top of its SSL or Neve console from the mid-eighties on? That's right, a Lexicon 480L. The console, the tape machine, the dynamics outboard and the reverb: those four pillars made the workflow and the sound. Reverb is almost always incredibly important to the sound of a record, and a good console plus a reverb can cover most of what a mix needs (see mixing).

Vocal reverb#

As a mastering engineer I sometimes get mixes with way too much reverb on the vocals. You don't need as much as you might think. You start putting it on, playing with it, you get carried away, you get used to it, and then it stays like that. If you back it off a bit, you get more clarity and the mix often sounds better.

Slapback#

That means duplicating the vocal and delaying the copy a bit, something like 50 milliseconds, so the wet vocal comes back really quickly after the dry one. Some people will think that's obvious, some may never have heard of it.

Reverb must be needed#

Just like any other type of processing you should add reverb only when the mix actually needs it, not systematically as "part of your mixing process".

What reverb won't do is fix rock drums that sound small. If you slap reverb on them, it just ends up sounding eighties. The size comes from the room and overhead mics (see mixing).

Most reverbs share the same DSP, so I built something different#

There are a million reverb plugins, and most of them are very similar under the hood. You don't have to spend anything to get a decent one: some free reverbs sound very good. I built Soloquium to do something else. It is modular, it does reverb and delay, and it can build the walls of the room from the input signal itself, a process called recursive convolution. And because patches get complicated, it has presets and scoped randomisation, so you can get somewhere interesting with one click without understanding every module.