Mixing 3 - Space - Reverb: Top To Bottom

Mixing 3 - Space - Reverb
A good mix fills a three dimensional space: top to bottom

(frequencies), left to right (panorama), front to back (depth).
Top to Bottom
The low to high frequency spectrum is crafted with your
arrangement. Fill it by writing interesting parts to fill the low,
middle and high ranges, then clarify it with EQ.
Left to right
This is created with stereo panning (pan is short for
‘panorama’). Panning decisions are relatively straightforward:
• low sounds in the center (bass and kick drum, always. Use Bass
Mono button on Utility plug-in)
• central characters in the center (lead vocal or instrumental line)
• the higher the sound, the more you can pan it to the edges
Listen to your favorite songs and you’ll see that this structure is
almost always followed.
(Exceptions are jazz albums and recordings pre-1970s, when

they used panning to separate instruments as if they were
standing on stage — piano on one side, bass on the other, etc.
This philosophy is all about naturalism — reproducing the
experience of an acoustic performance in a room.)
Adding Motion
Sounds can travel through the panorama. High sounds are

usually better candidates for motion than low sounds. Ways you
can do it:
• Automate the panning knob (on the track level, or on the clip
level with Envelopes)
• Effects like Autopan, which apply an LFO (a repeating shape
over time) to panning
• Stereo & ‘ping pong’ delays set up so the left and right channels
have different delay times.
Adding Width
A sound can be wider or narrower.
A narrow sound is one where exactly the same audio comes out
of both speakers — it will sound tight and dead-center. This is
mono.
Width is introduced as the details of the sound differ between

the left and right speakers. Our ears never hear exactly the same
sound in both ears - it’s variations in arrival time, and
differences in echoes and filtering from the room that give us an
impression of space.
The simplest way to widen a sound is to shift what comes out of

one speaker slightly later in time. You can do this with Delay.
• if Sync is set, change it to Time for both channels
• Set one to 1ms, and the other to 3-10ms
• turn up the Dry/Wet knob to hear the sound spread
• turn up Feedback to make the effect stronger
You can also add width with the Autopan utility (set the LFO to
very fast) and the Utility tool, as well as third party stereo width
tools.
Be careful: making sounds wider doesn’t always make them

bigger. They seem bigger at first, but they lose focus and punch
in the process. Low frequencies especially suffer when you
make them wider (because of phase cancellation) so that’s why I
use the Bass Mono button on the Utility plug-in.
In general, use a light touch. A common mixing mistake is to

create an image that is too spread out. Central characters —
lead vocals or instrumental lines — should be tight and in focus.
Supporting characters can spread to embrace and make space for
the leads.
Panning and EQ
A lot of EQ work is about carving space out of competing

sounds so there is space for everyone to shine.
Another way to handle competing frequencies is with

panning/width. If a lead vocal and a supporting synth are in the
same range, try keeping the vocal tight in the center and
spreading the supporting synth to the edges.
Front to Back: Reverb
This is the most subtle but most important dimension for giving
life and soul to our music.
It’s subtle because it’s largely subliminal. We hear the effects of

space our entire lives but rarely notice them.
Whenever we hear a sound, we are also hearing it bouncing off

of all of the surfaces in our space. Each of those echoes arrives
at our ear at a different time, and each one is “EQ’d” differently
(filtered by the material, the angle, conflicts with other echoes,
and the shape and position of our ears).
This quiet chaos of echoes blurs together in our minds and gives
us information about the kind of space we are in — the size, the
materials, even precise information about its contents. (This
information is good enough that humans can even learn to
echolocate like bats.)
Reverb effects simulate this in a variety of ways.
Types of reverbs:
For more information, there’s a great article here:

https://valhalladsp.com/2018/05/14/effect-o-pedia-reverb-types/
A brief summary:
• “Natural”
⁃ Ambience (short, mostly early reflections)
⁃ Room/Hall/Cathedral/Cave — various sizes & colors of spaces.
Natural
⁃ Chamber — a very reverberant but smaller space. Engineers
used to put speakers in a big cement or wood box, play the
sound through, and re-record.
⁃ These are done either with math models or with convolution,
where an audio sample of reverb from a space is used as a
resonator for your sound.
• Mechanical
⁃ Spring (sound fed into a wire spring and re-recorded. The
reverb knob on old guitar amps used this. “Awesomely crappy”
sound.)
⁃ Plate (sound fed into a metal plate. “Plates sound cool on
almost anything.”)
• Synthetic
⁃ Digital Plate
⁃ Shimmer (reverb + pitch shifting)
⁃ Bloom (very slow build time and decay)
⁃ Reverse (sounds like the reverb tail is backwards)
⁃ Gated (big room that gets immediately cut off. 1980s drum
sound.)
⁃ Nonlin (similar to gated - big space that dies quickly. 80s vibe.)
Anatomy of a reverb:
• Early Reflections (initial 5-20ms)

• Body and Tail (rest of the sound)
• Pre-delay (time before early reflections)
• Coloration/Dampening (filtering)
Practical Advice
When setting a Wet/Dry level, turn it up until you really

hear it, then turn it down a little.
When you’re focused on reverb, it’s easy to add too much.
Too much reverb is a common amateur mixing error.
Use Return Tracks and Groups

Putting multiple layers of sound through the same reverb
glues them together.
Set up a couple of contrasting reverb flavors as Return
Tracks, and use the Send Knobs to route different tracks to
them.
You can save this in your default template to save time
in the future.
Layering reverbs can be great but

Don’t put more than one reverb effect in a row. Don’t
reverb a reverb.
If you want to have multiple sounds at once (say, a bright
early reflection Ambiance and a quiet long atmospheric tail), do
them with Return tracks so they happen in parallel.
Stacking two similar reverbs won’t get you anything useful.
Think about how two contrasting reverbs can complement each
other. One fast, one slow / one natural, one artificial …
Put delays before reverb
(Before = to the left in an effects chain)
Think about it — do you want the crisp clear sound to
echo, or the diffuse sound to echo?
Delay after reverb is a recipe for extreme muddiness
EQ your Reverb
Think about how the reverb is going to compete with the
rest of your sound.
Will it muddy up an active low or mid range? EQ it
for a brighter, clearer sound.
Is it catching lots of ugly high vocal sibilant
frequencies, like “ss” and “shhh” ? EQ it darker.
Lots of reverb plug-ins (including the Ableton one) have
simple EQ filters built in.
Ableton has one at the beginning (to filter the initial
sound) and one at the end (to filter the reverb)
Reverbs blurring & dulling the attack of your sounds?

Turn up Pre-delay to put a little time between them.
Reverbs confusing the rhythms of your sounds?

Turn down Pre-delay to tighten them up.
Short sounds -> short reverb. Long sounds -> long reverb.
To stay precise and well defined, short sounds need their
reverb to be out of the way quickly.
If you want to go crazy, set reverb times to musically
meaningful units (1/4 notes, full bars, etc). You’ll need to
calculate reverb times against your tempo. I have never done
this but it makes sense. Here’s a handy calculator:
https://nickfever.com/Music/Blog/how-to-calculate-reverb-and-
delay-times
Don’t put your whole drum kit through a single reverb.

Think of reverb on drums as two separate processes:
⁃ Reverb to place the drums in a common space with other
sounds.
Sending a touch to your Return reverb track to glue things
together is ok. Doesn’t take a lot.
⁃ Reverb to add body, heft, life to your drums.
Different drums need different things:
Kicks don’t need much, you don’t want them to throw up tons of
muddy verb. If you do try reverb, eq it dark.
Toms can benefit from some reverb to add fatness and tone.
Gated reverb is the Phil Collins fat tom sound.
Snares and Claps are going to produce the most noticeable
reverb — you can use a lot on these, but make sure they decay
quickly enough (or are gated) so the reverb doesn’t get in the
way.
Hi hats and percussion sound great with short room or ambiance
(early reflections)
Careful about Pre-Delay — zero/low values are best here, as
higher values can confuse the rhythms.
⁃ My beat is in a single Drum Rack. How do I put different
reverbs on different drums?
You can drop effects on individual drums.
Alternately, the Drum Rac has its own internal send and receive
busses. Show them by clicking the Show Chain button (left
edge, third button from the top) and then the S and R buttons
that appear below it.
Lots of great reverb & drum advice here:
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/9-tips-for-using-reverb-with-
drums.html
Try substituting delay for reverb

A very short delay can be like an echo off a wall, and so
can function in a similar way to a reverb with lots of early
reflections. Presets for this are often called “slapback.”
Try automating room size / wet dry for different parts of

your track.
A common sound is for there to be a long trailing off reverb
when something ends, like the washy hangover at the beginning
of a breakdown section in a dance track. Don’t do this by
putting long reverb on the entire thing or you’ll make it all
muddy. Just use automation increase the room size / decay time
at the very end.
Another common sound is to increase reverb gradually
during a buildup.
Finely detailed automation of reverb is a common part of
those glitchy, hyperanimated drum and bass breaks in dubstep
kinds of tracks. (As always, forgive my very approximate
knowledge of EDM genrespace).
Print your reverb and edit it like audio.

Try this on an important lead track like vocals:
Make a new audio track.
Set its input to record from your reverb Return track.
Record just the reverb for the entire track.
Repeat with two other contrasting reverbs, so you
have three audio files of different reverbs.
Turn off the sends so you’re only working with audio.
Edit, automate, slide around these three layers to
create interesting & varied worlds around words and phrases.
Sudden chops, repetition, reversal, breakbeat style
edits are all things you can play with to create a surreal, hyper-
produced vocal world.
Recording some vocal reverb, reversing it, and using it

to lead into an entrance is also a common trick that for some
inexplicable reason I think of as “the Ozzy Osbourne” trick.
Thanks to Chris Botta who taught me this.
Reverb Plug-Ins
There are lots. I use:
Free
Max4Live Convolution Reverb (part of the M4L Essentials
pack from Ableton)
sounds really good
(There are more free reverbs listed at
http://www.afreestudio.com)
Cheap
Valhalla VintageVerb [$50]
SoundToys Little Plate [$100, but seriously just save up for
the complete bundle and wait for them to have a sale]
Exponential Audio PhoenixVerb [on sale now, $49]
Liquid Sonics Seventh Heaven [$69]
I work at studio with a Bricasti M7, a $4k piece of
hardware. It is incredibly gorgeous. This plugin emulates it.
There are fancy ones too. I bet they’re great.

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How can you add motion to sounds in a mix?

How can you add motion to sounds in a mix?

What are some techniques for adding width to a sound?

What are some techniques for adding width to a sound?

Mixing 3 - Space - Reverb

A good mix fills a three dimensional space: top to bottom

(Exceptions are jazz albums and recordings pre-1970s, when

Sounds can travel through the panorama. High sounds are

A sound can be wider or narrower.

Width is introduced as the details of the sound differ between

The simplest way to widen a sound is to shift what comes out of

Be careful: making sounds wider doesn’t always make them

In general, use a light touch. A common mixing mistake is to

A lot of EQ work is about carving space out of competing

Another way to handle competing frequencies is with

It’s subtle because it’s largely subliminal. We hear the effects of

Whenever we hear a sound, we are also hearing it bouncing off

Reverb effects simulate this in a variety of ways.

For more information, there’s a great article here:

• Early Reflections (initial 5-20ms)

When setting a Wet/Dry level, turn it up until you really

Use Return Tracks and Groups

Layering reverbs can be great but

Reverbs blurring & dulling the attack of your sounds?

Reverbs confusing the rhythms of your sounds?

Don’t put your whole drum kit through a single reverb.

Try substituting delay for reverb

Try automating room size / wet dry for different parts of

Print your reverb and edit it like audio.

Recording some vocal reverb, reversing it, and using it

Thanks to Chris Botta who taught me this.

There are lots. I use:

There are fancy ones too. I bet they’re great.

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