5 Tips To Improve Your Mixes With Reverb

Reverb – the effect we all know and love! It can become popular opinion among beginner mixers that it sounds good on anything and everything, however we later learn that there is a large amount of technique involved in getting reverb to actually improve our mixes and not clutter them up.

Below, we have compiled five tutorials that will help you effectively use reverb to craft amazing-sounding spaces in your mixes.

1. Common Reverb Mistakes
There are unfortunately many ways in which reverb can actually harm your overall mix. Some of these errors include it simply being overused or perhaps having an excess of low frequencies going through your reverbs and muddying up your mix.

The video below will walk you through 5 potential mistakes that can be made while using reverb so that you can avoid them in the first place!

2. Tempo Sync Your Reverbs
Using tempo-synced effects can be a great way to glue a mix together and ensure your effects are not competing with important elements of your arrangement. While delay is typically the most common effect in this area, adjusting your reverbs to be in time with your song can deliver fantastic results as well!

3. Creating Three-Dimensional Spaces With Reverb
A great goal to have while using reverb is to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space – such as a plate simulating the sound of a garage, or a hall simulating a large stadium. However, it can be difficult for reverb to sound real, and a great way to combat this is by using different reverbs in parallel.

4. Transforming Plucks Into Strings With Reverb
While reverb is great for imitating a space, it can also be used quite creatively for creating entirely new sounds when the dry signal is removed. The video below shows you one unique way in which you can transform a pluck into a realistic-sounding stringed instrument.

5. Reverb and delay in series, which comes first?
While this tutorial is not solely about reverb, reverb and delay often go hand in hand and are the bread and butter of an interesting mix. When using these effects together, the order in which the signal travels can play a dramatic role in the resulting sound.

As expressed in the video, there is no absolute rule for how your reverb and delay effects should be ordered, and it all depends on the individual mix. However, this tutorial will demonstrate what both scenarios (reverb > delay or delay > reverb) sound like.

We hope that you found these video tutorials to be helpful and to have taught you something new about using reverb! If you are looking to expand your arsenal of reverb techniques even further, we recommend our thorough video course, Reverb For Electronic Producers – A Practical Guide
https://www.adsrsounds.com/product/courses/reverb-electronic-producers-practical-guide/

Watch next: Using Delays As Reverb With Dave Pensado