Main room effects treatments

Designing the synth sounds which are going to add the power and drama you want for your mixes is only part of the pie. How they’re enhanced with spatial treatments is often just as important. As listeners, we love being pushed from pillar to post, from front to back, from loud to soft and from far away to touch-ably close. All of these points need careful consideration when it comes to mixing huge synth hooks and lead lines, particularly when approaching the twin tools of reverb and delay.

An immediate consideration for applying spatial effects to lead lines has to be whether you’re going to include them as insert effects on the channel strip for the synth lines themselves, or whether you’re going to add them, alongside these synth channels, as auxiliary effects. There are two reasons why it’s worth making a decision about this early on in the mixing process. Insert effects join with the source sound to become part of it – a single sound which passes through effects to reach the speakers. Auxiliary effects are added in addition to the source sound. So, if you want a sound to become 100% reverberant at any stage within your mix, this will prove tricky if you’re working with auxiliary effects, whose volume can be managed independently of the source sound, of course, but will nevertheless require some incoming signal to trigger the effect in the first place.

So surely insert effects are the better way to go? Not necessarily. The way that reverb effects split the sound sources is to label the incoming signal as the ‘dry’ sound and the generated reverb portion as ‘wet’. As the process of generating reverb is diffuse and distant, wet reverb signals tend to be quieter than their dry equivalents. This means that as you balance a sound more in favour of the wet portion (more reverb) and less in favour of the dry signal (less synth), the apparent volume of your lead sound will drop. And it could be that you want to achieve that balance at exactly the moment the synth line is supposed to be getting louder. Which parameters you automate to manage the rise and fall of reverb levels will also depend on which approach you adopt. If you’re working with auxiliaries, you’ll need to automate both the level of the dry signal and the return level of the auxiliary track. You might also want to adjust key parameters within your chosen reverb effect, such as its decay time. You’ll need to adjust these too if you’re working with inserts but just as important will be the dial or sliders which control the dry/wet balance, as explained above.

However, if you’re also working with delay, to place your big synth hook in a washier space, there are further considerations. If your dry synth line feeds an auxiliary delay, the echoes will also be dry. This might sound great but if your synth is also interacting with reverb, the dry delays might sound quite stark by comparison, giving an unnecessarily two-dimensional sound. Often, delays work better if they are also sent to the reverb, so that both dry sound sources (the original synth and its echoes) are being pushed into the distance by a spatial treatment. You can further enhance these atmospheric treatments by getting them ‘away’ from the middle ground which the lead synth is likely to occupy. Ping-pong delays, which scatter echoes from left to right, are often more effective than echoes which ‘repeat centrally’. Watch our video to see all of this in action.

As listeners, we love being pushed from pillar to post, from front to back and from loud to soft…