Essential Reverb Tips and Techniques

Learn how to use reverb like a professional mixing engineer with these useful tips

When it comes to music production, we tend to situate the elements of a track in their own space to add depth and dimension to the mix. Treating a sound with reverb is an excellent way of giving it space, but it requires a careful balancing act that should take into account the character of the source sound, and how it relates to both the other elements in the track and the mix as a whole. 

Mixing reverb can involve a subtle touch or more heavy-handed moves, depending on whether you’re working on vocals or bass, indie rock or techno, and, of course, good old-fashioned personal taste. Like most things in music production, there’s no one way of doing it, but there are definitely some techniques you can use to streamline your workflow and get great-sounding mixes. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some pro strategies for mixing reverb.

Set Up a Reverb Bus 

One of the decisions you’ll have to make when using a reverb plugin is whether to use it as an insert effect or through auxiliary sends and buses. Inserts are a good choice if you’re applying reverb treatment to a single track, especially if it’s the only track in your session that uses that particular reverb. However, when you’re working with a lot of tracks that need reverb, setting up an individual reverb treatment for each one will eat up your CPU and quickly become hard to manage.

Setting up a reverb bus is a great way of conserving CPU usage and creating a consistent sonic space across multiple instruments. A bus is an extra track in your DAW that receives an input from another track, and you can send as many signals as you want this way. 

By placing a reverb plugin on a bus and then sending other instruments into it, you can streamline your workflow and save time. More often than not you’ll have the main reverb that you use on lots of elements in your mix, and this should be controlled from a master reverb bus.

Add Clarity with Pre-Delay

When you find a great-sounding reverb it can be tempting to go all out and smother your tracks in it. One of the issues with doing this is that too much reverb can make it difficult to hear the detail in the original unprocessed signal. The more you saturate a sound in reverb, the more it will become background material, while a lighter treatment tends to keep things up front.

If you’re wondering how to use reverb like a pro, a parameter that you should pay close attention to on your reverb plugin is pre-delay. Pre-delay is a time-based setting that lets the plugin know how long to wait before it starts applying reverb. If you set the pre-delay to 40ms, the plugin will wait for 40 milliseconds before it engages. 

Using iZotope NIMBUS let’s use pre-delay to carve out some space for a guitar track that’s sounding a little bit muddy, with the individual notes getting swamped by the reverb. You can add clarity by setting the pre-delay just past the longest attack of the notes in the guitar track to keep the signal dry while they play but also include the nice reverb tail in between.

NIMBUS also supports temp-syncing for pre-delay and reverb delay, so you can dial in your reverb via a rhythmic note value according to a tap tempo setting or the BPM set in your DAW. This feature allows for a musical use of the reverb and helps you to blend it in more naturally with your mix.

Use a Mono Reverb in a Busy Mix 

When you’re mixing music it’s generally a good idea to try and order the elements of the track like they would be played on stage, giving each their own space. Where you decide to locate a sound should then determine how you process it, whether that’s with reverb, delay, compression, EQ or anything else.

Some reverb plugins, like EAReverb 2, offer a room visualiser that helps to get a read on what exactly is happening to your sound. Choose from a range of rooms and reverb styles, and then simply drag your instrument’s icon around the space. You can pan the left and right channels for the dry signal, to finetune an instrument’s location on the stage or make up for any off-centre instrument recordings.

Most digital reverbs are in stereo by default, and if you’re using the effect as an insert it will come in after any panning you’ve set up on the track. If you’re using a reverb bus then the track will be sent over after it’s been panned, too. The trouble is, that the reflections of the stereo reverb will spill out over the entire stereo field regardless of where the track is panned. This can lead to your mix sounding messy and washed out. 

If you have a busy mix with lots of instruments panned across the stereo field, you should consider using a mono reverb to help maintain isolation and clarity. Using a mono reverb such as a plate or a spring reverb will give you lots of depth while also not gobbling up too much space in the mix. 

You can pan the reverb return to the opposite side from the dry signal, or slot it neatly behind it. Mono reverbs can be interesting creative tools too, for instance, if you use one on a wide stereo source you’ll hear the sound almost being sucked from out to in, which can be a pretty cool effect.

Sidechain your Reverb Bus

A tool favoured by dance music producers, sidechain compression is a form of audio ducking which works when the level of a sound triggers a compressor. This technique can be used to make synths pump to the beat of a song, but when used subtly it’s also very useful for cleaning up a mix. 

Sidechain compression can be a great way of applying reverb to sounds without overpowering them. All you have to do is set up a compressor on your reverb bus that’s side-chained to your desired output signal. Let’s try this out on a vocal track in Studio One with Valhalla Shimmer. 

How to Use Sidechain Compression with Reverb

First, create a bus channel and put Shimmer on it. The plugin should be at 100% Wet, as you’ll be able to control how much of the vocal you send over to it using Studio One’s track sends.

Next, add a compressor (we’re using Pulsar 1178) to the reverb bus. Click the arrow at the top of the plugin to open up the sidechain panel, and then add the vocal track in the Audio From dropdown menu.

If you’ve done this correctly, you’ll hear the compressor clamp down on the reverb when your vocals are playing and release it when they aren’t. Alternatively, you could compress your vocals but send the pre-compressed signal to the reverb bus. This way the reverb will pump in time with the rising and falling volume levels of the original take, adding an extra layer of dynamics and realism.

Automate the Dry / Wet Knob

Our final reverb mixing tip is to use an automation track on the dry/wet knob of your reverb plugin. We’ve outlined how to create consistency and depth in your mix already, but it’s important to note that a good track will contain transitions and moments that call for isolated adjustments. By manually drawing in an automation line to raise or lower the amount of reverb being applied to the sound at specific points you can wield tight control of the finer detail in the track.

In this example we have NIMBUS set up on a bus track, with multiple instruments sending their signal out to it. Everything is sounding great, right up until the moment where you want to introduce a hard stop just before the final chorus. The reflections of the reverb are spilling out into the space created by the stop and nullifying the impact of the final kick-in.

The solution here is to automate the reverb’s dry/wet knob so that it tails off to zero on the beat of the stop. The reverb tail will cut off cleanly, and you can automate the reverb to return to its previous level when everything comes back in.