Attack Of The Reverb

Add brightness and the illusion of sharper transients to your mix by using this clever reverb processing trick

Modern commercial music often has a crisp, bright sound but it can be hard to extract that sound from our own productions without the high frequencies sounding over-processed or fatiguing. A great technique to help with adding brightness and sharper transients to your mix is to add a transient shaper to your reverb sends before boosting the attack subtly. When used with care, this’ll give a more defined feel to the track’s high frequencies while avoiding the excessive transient spikes that applying similar processing to the dry signal typically brings and putting less strain on any master limiting. This can work well on any reverb send, but we’re using it on a dry drum break.

We’ll start by adding some reverb to a dry sounding drum break – add Liquidsonics Reverberate 2 on a fresh FX channel before setting up a -12dB send from our drums to the reverb. Quickly set Reverberate’s wet/dry control to 100%. Now let’s pick a...

As our drums have a classic feel, we’ll go for a nice plate reverb – choose the Thin Plate preset. Now, we can add a transient shaper (we’re using Cubase Pro’s Envelope Shaper) to our FX channel after Reverberate before pushing the attack amount to 3...

Turning the transient shaper on/off a few times will demonstrate the difference our small tweak has made – the drums now sound sharper and more defined without overly dominating the mix. Finally, we’ll set up a -30dB send from the guitar track to the...