Stereo vs. mono reverb

[John Link]

Can anyone tell me what it is that makes stereo reverb sound so different from mono reverb?

Thanks,
John Link

[Charles D. Ballard]

Well... not to be too obvious, but one is in stereo and one is mono. To be a little more technical, there is phasing in the stereo reverb which more effectively replicates space.

[K.B.]

I would say a stereo reverb gives you a 3 dimensional (is someone going to tell me it's only 2 dimensional?) sense of space. This is often referred to as some type of room - like typical settings might be 'hall' or 'cathedral' on your home cinema system. A good reverb will mimic more than just the size of a room, but also how 'live' the various surfaces are. An excellent reverb will go even further - convolution reverbs use 'convolution samples' (all done very technically) from real spaces, often famous venues (so they claim) to capture the feel of what it is like to be there.

The downside is that a stereo reverb can smear the stereo image of your instruments, particulary if you start using multiple instances on several instruments. So it can often be legit to just use mono reverbs and place the stereo image where the original instrument is.

But writing this I realise just how huge the holes in my knowledge on this are. Should you use a convolution reverb later in the mix?

Be interesting to hear what other folks' techniques on using reverbs might be...

[Bazzle]

But writing this I realise just how huge the holes in my knowledge on this are.

You seem to have a pretty good grasp of it. Best reverb is, less reverb and more actual room sound. Trouble with that is, you have to also be a very good player or vocalist for that to work. Peace Y'all!!

[cerberus]

If you are working with multiple reverbs, it can help in preventing a blurring effect to gate some of them and to have a pre-delay on some.

cerberus

[lemix]

Yeah Bazboy.. beside, reverb is old school..
a

[K.B.]

It occurs to me that we may have not answered the original question - perhaps he meant 'why is a mono reverb still regarded as mono when you can pan it in a stereo mix?' The answer is that all the infromation from a mono reverb has no stereo information, no 'roominess'. If you pan it to a specific position all the information is panned there too - there is nothing to suggest that you are in a room.

For example, if you wanted to accurately recreate the sound of an electric guitarist with one practice amp sitting in a cathedral, you might pan him to the centre, then use Guitar Rig (or some such similar amp modeller) set to mono as a plug in. You might set the plug to have some reverb on it because that's the way a lot of guitarists set their amps. That all stays in mono, panned to the centre, because in this example that's where his amp is, next to him. So, that gives you him, his guitar, and his amp with its reverb in the centre, but no sense of what's around him. To do that you might then add a convolution reverb, which is in full stereo, to the final result to create the 'cathedral' he's in. This will add info about sound bouncing back from the walls, and will give a sense of space.

That's the theory, just to demonstrate the difference mono and stereo reverb, but in a recording studio I doubt anyone actually does it quite like that because you try not to have reverbs on top of reverbs because it can sound messy, and anyway Guitar Rig left in stereo is kind of awsome.

That was long winded...

[JCBigler]

...often famous venues (so they claim)...

What? you don't believe that these manufacturers actually went out to two (or more) dozen different halls all over the world and shot them up with starter pistols and frequency sweeps?

[Banister]

One Thing I noticed about the Digidesign Reverb... Phase PROBLEM ! (DVerb)

- I used the middle/side mic technique when recording a tamborine overdub.

- I made my own M/S decoder by panning the Side track hard left and also sending it to an Aux input that was panned hard right. I then put an EQ plugin on the Aux channel just to use the phase reversal.

- I wanted the tamborine to be compressed with the other drums and percission so I routed all 3 to the Stereo Drum Buss Aux that I had already set up. (Middle Channel, SIde Channel, and the Phased Aux)

I then noticed that my side channels of the tamborine disapeared!!!!!

I had a stereo DVerb plugin on my Drum Buss. After some experimenting, I discovered that the DVerb was the culprit!!! Using a Dual Mono DVerb instead on the Drum Buss gave a similar reverd effect without canceling out my M/S stereo image.