Combining reverbs within one track

Reverb isn’t just about the sound of the space you’re listening in – it can also describe the distance of you and the listener from sound sources as well

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We’ll carry on developing the track that we’ve been working on in the videos. After the reverb effects added through those steps, here’s how the track currently sounds with a new dry set of string parts added from Vienna Symphonic Library’s Dimension Strings.

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The strings sound very dry which makes them very ‘close’. As they’ve been recorded in a dry space, they need to be placed ‘further away’. We add FabFilter’s Pro-R to the string group with a short dark reverb. You can compare the dry and wet signals across the two halves of the loop.

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It’s the Distance parameter at the top which works well here. This sets the proximity between us and the source sound. In a concert hall, we’d tend to be a few metres away (at least) from a string ensemble, so setting these samples back feels right.

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Now that the strings are ‘placed’, we can add space to them. To glue them to the other elements in the mix, we’re sending them to the Dark Plate from Valhalla VintageVerb, created for the Bass part; and the fizzy UVI Sparkverb, created for the Click and Rim parts.

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We turn the string volume down, then apply this multi-reverb approach to the Click and Rim group. These have the Sparkverb fizz but lack reinforcement in the midrange. We add this via VintageVerb as well as using a new Pro-R treatment, in-channel, to set this part back in the mix a little too.

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We add some sidechain compression pumping to the strings and drop their level before setting up a final reverb treatment; a Lexicon Hall. This is added to the strings, the sequence part at the top of the mix and the ticking, filtered sequence.