 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. If you're in the habit of simply grabbing your reverb plug and dragging it across and dropping it into the insert section of your track, then you may be falling into a trap that many of us do when we first start mixing. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I think the problem which occurs here is up until the point where we insert that reverb plug in, we've been listening to a really dry source, perhaps something like a vocal that was recorded in a vocal booth and when we drop that reverb on suddenly the whole thing comes to life and it seems like some magic occurs and perhaps we'll adjust things like the size of the reverb and blend the dry and wet mix but pretty much we'll feel like the magic is done and we move on with the rest of our mix. Not realising that every time we do this we're reducing the clarity and adding to the overall muddiness of our mix. So most of the five essential reverb tricks I'm going to show you in this video relate to creating a space for that reverb and creating more clarity in our mix. Now I want to start up front, it doesn't matter which door you're using, the principles are the same across the board in this video. So let's get started with the basics. So the first thing I'd like you to do is to commit to no longer inserting your reverb plug-ins directly onto the channel where you want to apply them. Instead we're going to be using busses. Now in your door they may be called auxes or effects channels or something like that but the principles are always the same. It's a channel where the reverb is going to live and we're going to send the signal from the original source in this case a vocal to that channel. So here in studio one I'm going to do it in the manual way so you can more easily follow along in your door. I'm going to right click here and just select add bus channel okay that creates my bus channel. I'm going to rename it right away. I'll call it a vox rev. The reason I do that is because you end up usually with many busses for different effects and things and you want to be able to easily identify each one. So the next thing I'm going to do is grab my reverb plug-in this time I'm going to drag it and drop it into the insert section of that bus that I just created. So there it is I'm just going to pin it there. Now it doesn't matter which plug-in you're using I happen to be using one of the stock plug-ins which comes with studio one here but the principles are going to be the same with any plug-in. Now the next thing I need to do is to send my original signal my vocal in this case to that bus so I'll go to the send section of that vocal and I'll just go to my destinations here and select that bus I just created their vox rev. So now that I've done that I'm going to have a quick listen to what I've got so far. Okay there's definitely some reverb on those vocals quite a bit too much I would say that's okay we're going to fix that but before we do there's another important thing I want you to do whenever you use a reverb plug-in in a bus like this usually on these plugins there's going to be a mix control it's going to blend the dry and the wet mix together in this case on this plug-in it's locked at the moment so I'll unlock it and show you what I mean so this blends the dry and the wet signals I want to want you to make sure that it's always completely wet we're not hearing the dry signal with this plug-in or on this channel at all that's because we've already got the dry signal on the original track okay we don't want to add to it at this point so the next thing I'm going to do is grab the fader for that channel that I just created that bus and drag it all the way down to the bottom play my track and then gradually just blend the reverb in okay that's much better but in all honesty we haven't really gained any advantage yet over using the insert method that we looked at earlier but that's all going to change now so this trick is often called the abbey road reverb trick and essentially what it does is EQs the reverb part of our signal not the original source so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab an EQ plug-in in this case again just the stock plug-in which comes with studio one and I'm going to drop it in as an insert again but this time just before the reverb plug-in that we just inserted there now some people use this after the reverb and you can try that if you like but generally I find I get better results if it's before the reverb because I'm adjusting or refining the signal before it gets processed by the reverb now it doesn't matter which plug-in you use but you do want to make sure that you've got a low pass and a high pass filter or sometimes called a low cut and high cut on this particular plug-in it's called low cut so I'll just switch that on and then I'll also switch on my high cut okay now in terms of settings with my low cut or the part which is dealing with the low frequencies I'm going to set this to let's set it to 600 Hertz okay this is a really common setting for this technique the other thing I want to make sure of is that my slope is set to around about 12 dB it could be 18 but in this case I'll just leave it as 12 okay the same for the high cut we can set that to 12 or 18 something like those settings but this time I'm going to set the frequency to 10k okay now this one is much more flexible and you're going to adjust that for your particular track but usually that low cut is going to be set to 600 Hertz okay so what this is doing in the low end it's cutting out all of the mud which can occur and which can build up with each reverb plug-in that you add and then in terms of the high frequencies we're getting rid of some of those especially things like sibilants sibilants etc which can really become a bit sort of harsh and distracting in that high end now as a final part to this tip you can also do a little bit of a cut at around about 2k okay so maybe something like around about here this can be really useful with things like vocals you may want to adjust the cue of course but things like vocals which can become a little bit harsh in those areas and they can get sort of accentuated by the reverb okay so that's a very basic setup and you may want to adjust it for your particular song so let's just have a listen to the vocals before and after we have this EQ applied so all I'm going to do is just solo the vocals and solo the channel which has the reverb on it and have a quick listen without the EQ first of all and now with the EQ so we're still getting that nice spacious effect here but we haven't added to the mud just to demonstrate this a little bit further what I'm going to do is turn down the actual original vocal okay so we're just listening to the reverb channel the reverb bus have a listen that's what we're now getting but before we had the EQ what we were getting was this so especially with that low end there you can hear how that may become problematic because if we're adding that with every single channel that we're using with reverb you know backing vocals all kinds of other instruments then we're really going to get a low end build up likewise with some of those more harsh sounds in the mid and high frequencies we're going to get a kind of a build up with those as well so there's quite a few variations on this next trick I'm going to show you I'll show you my simple version first form we'll talk about those variations later before we get into it though I've done a little bit of preset up here I've already created another bus just as we did earlier and I've named it vox del that's a little bit of a clue as to what we're going to be doing and then also I've created the send for that bus already and I've switched off the send for the reverb that we just created a moment ago so we won't be hearing that for a moment but we'll switch it back on later now what I'm going to do is grab a delay plugin and drop it into the insert section of that new channel doesn't matter which delay plugin you use I'm using replica xt but most of them are capable of doing what I'm about to show you now the first thing that I'm going to do is grab that mix control as we did with the reverb and switch it all the way up to a hundred so that we're only hearing the delay in that channel okay now let's have a listen to see or hear what it's doing so far was it so you're hearing many repeats there we don't want that we just want one repeat at the moment and normally with the delay plugin you'll control that with the feedback control so I'll pull feedback all the way down to zero and that's just going to give us one repeat have a listen okay so we've got one repeat but it's kind of a long delay yeah we want it to be really short so I'm going to change this from sort of a musical control to our control which is in milliseconds we can see that here do that on your plugin if you have that capability and I'm going to make it pretty short let's start off at around about sort of around about 50 milliseconds but we're likely to go lower than that but just have a quick listen okay so we're hearing a really short delay there I'll just pull it down just a little bit more we'll go to about 30 have a listen okay so we're getting a kind of a very short delay there and it's all in the middle so an important thing I reckon to do at this point is to make a little bit of difference between the delay for the left and the right channels now on this particular plugin the way you do that is go to the panning controls and you've got this offset control here for the left and right channels let's just push that up so I don't know about five or six let's have a listen now what we've done here is taken that very very dry vocal and we've kind of put it into a bit of space but it doesn't sound very natural at the moment the actual effect is way too evident and personally I like to be a bit more subtle with it so what we're going to do is the same as we did with the reverb we'll drag the failure down on the channel and we'll gradually blend it in and I'm sort of looking for that point where you become ever so slightly aware of the effect and then we're just going to back off from that now the idea here as I say is to put our vocals in a little bit of space so they're not completely dry but the way I think of this is it takes away some of the heavy lifting from the actual reverb plugin which is following it if that makes sense so if we're not careful if we just use a single reverb plugin it can actually push the vocal away and make it less present so with this we can keep the vocal nice and present and in some space and just have the the main reverb plugin take care of those nice long tails so I'm going to switch that back on again and let's have a listen to what we've got so far now when it's soloed like this you're really aware of those tails but in the context of the mix let's have a listen we've got this vocal which although it's got a sort of massive reverb for this particular song but it's still nice and present it's still nice and upfront now finally what I would often do in this case is go back to my original reverb plugin and I just have a little bit of pre-delay in fact I already did it on here I've just created about 40 seconds or so so the the bigger reverb is not happening until after that initial delay that's just the way I like to do it you can play around with some different settings on that now some of the variations would be that quite a lot of people don't actually use a delay plugin for this stage they would just use a reverb plugin but we're just looking for that initial effect of some initial reflections okay early reflections other variations would be that some people will also use a medium reverb perhaps even another one as well three or four plugins and then sort of blend all of them together okay so I don't tend to go that far but I know lots of people do and definitely experiment with that yourself now if you find that particularly large reverbs are still getting in the way of your original source making it less distinct then what you can try is some compression on the actual reverb or ducking as they call it essentially what we're going to do is use a compressor to lower the volume of the reverb while this vocal is actually happening while she's actually singing and then only release it when she stops singing so I'll take my original reverb channel here I'm just going to grab a compressor and drop it on there after the actual reverb plugin okay and importantly I'm going to sidechain this so in other words I'm going to use the original vocal as my source for the compressor to suppress the volume of the reverb so here in studio one the way I do that is to go up to sidechain here and then I will select the main vocal as my source for the sidechain okay the other thing I'm going to do is make this a pre-fader send so in other words it's not going to be affected by the fader I'm only doing that so that I can turn the original vocal down and we can just hear what's happening with the compressed signal that's exactly what I'm going to do now is just turn that fader down let's have a listen to what's happening so far nothing's happening so far because we haven't set the threshold correctly so let's just push this threshold down until we start to get some actual compression I'm just going to push the ratio up a little bit so we're getting more compression so you can hear the actual reverb sound is lowering in volume every time the vocalist sings now I think you need to play around a little bit with the attack and release on this so it doesn't sound too harsh we don't want to hear that sort of coming in and out so I find it just smooths off a bit if I just push the attack and the release up somewhat we'll have a listen to this so it is just compressing that vocal a little bit I could do it a little bit more sorry the reverb have a listen and most importantly of course we now need to hear it with the original vocal have a listen so the original vocal is still remaining present but as soon as she stops singing singing you hear that lovely tail happening there let's just switch that off and have a listen to this in context so all in all we have this vocal with the lovely space around it but it's still remaining present before we move on to our final trick I'd like to remind you that I highly recommend our sponsor DistroKid if you want to release your music to major platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play etc they make it super easy for you to do that at a really great price and you'll get it even cheaper if you follow that VIP link in the description down below a little later on in this song I've got a guitar which comes in on the left channel and it sounds like this and I've got another guitar a separate performance which comes in on the right hand channel sounds like this and both together they sound like this doubled guitars and they're sitting on top of the main guitar which sounds like this all together and they just slightly enhance that guitar but what I want to do with those two higher guitars that come in a little bit later is add some nice spacious reverb on them but I'm going to do it in a particular way I've already created two extra buses over the end here and they've already both got reverbs set up on them I'll turn the mute off on them and they're both panned or one of them is panned hard left and the other one is panned hard right and they're called high rev l and high rev r respectively and the way this trick works is I take my guitar which is panned hard left and I send it to the reverb which is panned hard right okay so the dry signal from this guitar is completely coming from the left channel and the wet reverb signal is coming from the right and I do the same with the other guitar so the guitar that was panned right I send it to the reverb which is panned left let's have a listen to what that does to them and it creates a really nice pretty sophisticated gentle amount of width okay and when I add that in with my original guitar I'm getting this lovely effect so this is a great technique to keep in your back pocket when you want to deal with some doubled instruments or things that are panned hard left and hard right make sure that you send them to reverbs in the opposite channel and also just as a little additional thing to this try some different settings if you're using the same reverb plugin just use some slightly different settings in terms of size and maybe pre-delay that kind of thing that can help by in terms of adding some more width I wouldn't mind betting that some of you have got some variations on these tips and tricks please let me know about them in the comments down below I'd love to hear about the different ways that you guys get great results in your mixes now if you're just starting out with mixing or you've been doing it for a while but need some reminders about the basics I highly recommend that you watch this video right here