How to use reverb

> Step by step 2. Demonstrating reverb with Surreal Machines Microfuse

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Now you know your way around a reverb, let’s look at how to use them. You can use reverb on any sound you like. That said, how much reverb you use will be genre specific, and often follows trends and tastes. Here we’re using Surreal Machines Microfuse and the drum kit audio from the tutorial files at FileSilo. 4

Now try sending some of the snare drum track to the small reverb. Increase the level until you hear the effect – we’ve set our Send level at about -3dB. Looking at the reverb parameters we’ve just increased the Repeat parameter slightly to 75ms. The reverb adds nice width to the snare sound. 7

Work through other kit sounds including room and overheads. Try using the two different reverbs to add width and space. Here we’ve added the medium reverb to our drum kit room mics, which works quite well, but we now don’t need to send the snare to the medium reverb, so have turned its send to zero. 2

Creating ambience using reverbs isn’t as easy as simply grabbing a space you like and adding it to everything. In fact, our advice is to start with two different reverbs, and possibly add a third. Load two instances of Microfuse on two separate auxiliaries. 5

Now, let’s add the same reverb to the kick. A little goes a long way when adding reverb to kick drums. Here we’ve set our kick drum Send level to about -11dB, just to add a little width. At this point try muting the reverb return track to A/B what’s happening. You’ll hear the changes so far are subtle. 8

Now let’s try this approach with a vocal. We’ve loaded the Lead Vocal dry file and added some of the small reverb (Send -15dB). This works well if we just want to give the vocal a bit of space. Alternatively, for a bigger effect, remove the small send and just use the medium reverb instead (Send -16dB). 3

We’re going to make the first reverb quite short and the second one a medium size. From Microfuse’s presets we’ve chosen Reverb Small Plate and Reverb Medium Hall respectively. As before make sure the Mix control is set to 100% wet for both plugins. 6

Next, send the snare drum to the medium reverb. Listening to the reverb in solo it sounds a bit too long, so we’ve adjusted the Regen down to 46% and also increased the Diffusion slightly to 88%. Getting the Send level right for this takes a bit of trial and error. We’ve set ours to -13dB but may revisit that. 9

Finally, although we like this effect, it does sound quite dense in the lower frequencies. It’s perfectly OK to EQ a reverb, and plenty of reverbs include filtering or EQ. If not, simply add one after the reverb. Here we’ve set the low-cut filter on Eareckon CM EQUA 87 to 500Hz to gently reduce the lower frequencies.