Why reverb is a tool commonly overused

Friday, February 15th, 2008

The reason that you can tell by listening to a recording whether it was sung in the bathroom or a spacious hall is due to the property called reverb. Although during the process of recording there is a certain amount of reverb (that can be minimized through the judicious placement of recording equipment), the skillful mixing of reverb most often adds greatly to the aesthetic quality of music.

Digitally speaking, despite the many types of reverb - hall, room, plate, ambience, gated and reverse, there are only a few parameters which are tweaked when adding reverb to a file to add a multitude of effects :

Pre-Delay Time

Setting the time between the impulse and the early first reflection. This creates an illusion of room size and helps to keep the original sound distinct from the reverb.

High Frequency Damping

It simulates the absorptive properties (both air and surface) of a real space by making the high frequency decay time shorter than the overall decay time. Some reverbs also allow low frequency damping to simulate spaces which reflect mainly high frequency sounds. These effects can also be combined to produce other subtle effects.

Overall Decay Time

Sets the value of RT60 (the time the reverb takes to die away by 60dB after the end of the initial sound is produced). The longer the decay time the larger and more reflective the artificial space seems to be.

Early Reflection Pattern and Level

Most reverb settings give the user a choice of preset patterns (rooms, halls, plates, chambers, ambiences etc.) as mentioned earlier. The greater the spacing in between these individual reflections the larger the room ‘feels’. Some reverbs allow the user to alter the level and spacing of the early reflections.

We are accustomed to listening to music played indoors in buildings with its distinct ‘natural’ acoustic properties. The natural reverberation affects all the sounds in a building. Every sound produced in the building has the same reverb. Pop music producers tend to use a variety of reverbs within the same mix; even each instrument can have a different amount of reverb while multiple reverb units can have different type of reverb. However, like most effects, reverb works best when it is used sparingly. It is easy to get carried away and drown everything in multiple spasms of reverb, but this obscures the song’s natural feel, and prevents it from ‘breathing’. If you listen to some well produced music you’ll find that the use of reverb is light and restrained. When long reverb tails are used, the music will have been specially arranged to provide space for them.

Reverberation can be applied to any sound, but in modern pop production it is most often used on percussion and vocals. Remember, the chief rule of using reverb is…don’t overuse it!
As a producer, it is vital to put a special emphasis on the skillful use of reverb to vocal performances. This is one area we believe, that reverb can achieve a virtually complete makeover. This is the very reason why so many of us find ourselves so compellingly different when we sing in our bathrooms. However there are quite a few elements to consider :

• Long reverbs reduce intelligibility, and it is vitally important that the words are clear and distinct
• Bright reverbs can sound exciting, but tend to over-emphasize sibilance (the use of s, sh, ch, z, j sounds in our speech).
• Too little reverb in a vocal composition can make the vocal seem ‘plastered on to’ the backing track, rather than sounding comfortable in the background mix
• Long reverb can sound quite attractive, but tends to fill the spaces in the music; the spaces are just as important as in music as in relationships
• Adding reverb creates the illusion of distance, and normally we want the singer to be at the foreground, (unless we are deliberately mixing backing vocals…)
• For intimate vocals, short settings (less that 1 sec) with a fairly bright reverb are better. Also a high level of early reflections are important.
• A ‘drawn out’, more prolonged effect can be produced by introducing more pre-delay to separate the original sound and the reverb

At times, we at Hoff Mastering applies carefully selected, high quality mastering reverb to submitted mixes. This can create a totality of illusion of space around the music, and combat that dry, ‘glued to the speakers’ sound.

Reverb is very easy to overuse, and although mixing professionals are used to the technique of introducing it even in multiple complicated segments, its best to keep a master copy in the event you want the changes reversed. Once already mixed before submission for professional mastering its practically impossible undo it, even by us !