The Final Frontier
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Peter Wetherbee
FINDING THE RIGHT SPACE FOR YOUR TRACKS TIGHTENS UP MIXES AND DEMANDS LISTENERS' ATTENTION. SPATIAL EFFECTS SUCH AS REVERB AND DELAY SHOW THE WAY
Waves TrueVerb
We humans naturally perform some interesting spatial decoding with each sound we hear. By tracking the microseconds of delay and minor timbral differences between how a sound source is perceived by each ear, our brains autonomously calculate how far away it is and what direction it is coming from. This microprocessor-style analysis is pretty sophisticated stuff. As sounds fade away, their reverberations bounce around and settle into silence, giving our hearing something to digest and mull over as well.
The transformation of initial sonic reflections into the fractal entropy that characterizes reverberation informs us subconsciously about the way energy flows through sound waves. This information is both cosmic and spiritual, a way for our deeper selves — above and beyond our mere intellectual minds — to grasp a larger picture of how the universe works. With all the brainpower needs for this sound processing, it's no wonder that most of the music that's called “psychedelic” relies heavily on spatial effects such as reverb, delay, phase shifting, etc.
But you don't have to believe these cosmic speculations in order to agree that you can create a tremendous amount of sonic intrigue in your mixes by employing spatial effects; there simply would be no dub music without time-based delay effects and sweeping phase shifting, and can you imagine ambient chill-out music without reverb and delays? Not to mention just about every lead vocal track you've ever heard.
36 CHAMBER REVERBS
Reverb as an effect was originally created to make records sound rich, resonant and natural, the same way a live performance sounds in an acoustically pleasing room or concert hall. Reverb as an effect has been the single most crucial type of processing throughout the history of multitrack recording. However, the two biggest ways to screw it up are to use either too much or the wrong kind of reverb. Back in the day, there were dedicated rooms with speakers and microphones that served as “chambers;” a sound would be piped into speakers in the room and picked back up by the microphones in the room as 100-percent natural room reverberation. Needless to say, placement of the speakers and microphones within the chamber would make all the difference.
(re)MIXED MEDIARemix contributor and audio professional Peter Wetherbee prepared these audio examples to correspondent with The Final Frontier article.
1.Dry drum hits
2.Drum Hits with reverb and phasor added
3.Female vocal
4.Female vocal with "invisible" reverb
5.Male vocal
6.Male vocal with "invisible" reverb added
7.Manual delay effect
Another kind of old-school reverb comes from a “plate,” which is a sheet of metal that vibrates when it is hit with a signal; a transducer then sends the reverberations back to be blended with the original signal. That 2-D reverb sounds great on vocals. However, although it is rich and textured, plate reverb does not contain the complexity — or the key early reflections — of a 3-D room.
Traditional use of reverb for a “natural”-sounding mix goes something like this: If you have recorded a bunch of tracks direct or close-miked, you can add varying amounts of a tasteful room reverb to make it sound like everything was played in the same room. That reverb will make a mix sound natural to our ears. Without the reverb, a mix can have an unsettling dryness — in other words, the flat-sounding quality of instruments that have no ambient aura.
For that reason, a very dry instrument or voice will stand out and sound a little weird within the comfortable ambience of a good mix, and that can be used as a cool spatial effect in and of itself: The complete absence of spatial enhancement can be the most radical ambient effect of all in some cases, which is worth remembering while you mix. Without the merciful cushion of reverb however, your track will be exposed beyond nakedness, and any sonic warts will be ruthlessly exposed. The flip side is that too much reverb “clothes” the individual elements of your song into a dense, muddy mix that sounds far away, murky or just grossly amateurish.
Let's say, however, that you have tastefully sent varying amounts of key instruments on an aux send bus to a room reverb effect that you like. You could then take it a step further and change the amount of pre-delay for individual instruments; pre-delay simulates early reflections before the wash of the reverb itself and suggests, among other things, how far away within the room the instrument is.
If you are mixing in the box and have the processing power, you can use multiple iterations of your carefully tweaked reverb plug-in, each with different early reflection/pre-delay settings, which would serve to place the respective elements in different parts of the room itself. Such subtle adjustments add more depth and complexity to a mix that is already in the ballpark, sonically.
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