Reverb question??

[22down]

I hope I am not wasting too much of anybody's time with this stupid question, but I'm confused. I know there are reverb presets for snares, guitars, vocals, etc. etc. But should you put reverb on the master to effect the entire mix? And if you do that, should you put a seperate reverb on the snare alone? Basically I'm wondering if you should put reverb only on the stereo master, or some individual tracks, or both? I know you can do whatever sounds good, but what is the standard practice? Thanks very much in advance.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Read my response in this previous thread.

Rail

[spookster]

Yeah, what he said. If that was Chinese math to you, wich judging by your original question, it probably was, then I might help to clarify that for you.

By the way Rail, did you see your shrine thread yet. Attaboy!! Keep up the good advice, we love ya here on the DUC.

Anyway, what Rail was saying in plain English was, no, you would almost never want to put a reverb on a master fader. The way it is most commonly used is on an aux track. When you place the reverb on an aux track, you gain a number of advantages. You can buss any track to that aux track at any variable level you desire. Meaning that you can use one reverb for any combination of tracks at any level you would like. If you want a lot of reverb on the snare, then send a hot level from the snare to the aux track. If you only want a small amount of reverb on the guitars, then only send a small level of the guitars to the aux track. This way you can mix the dry (no effects) signal with the wet (effects) signal any way you'd like, instead of just inserting the effect directly into the signal chain of any particular track. There is one other major advantage to doing things in this fashion, you save a ton of processing power. Especially with reverbs, because reverbs require a ton of CPU power to run. So instead of having five different reverbs for five different tracks. You simply use one reverb for all five tracks. Works like a charm!

Rails answer basically said the same thing as mine, just in a different way. Hope this is helpfull.