Rainbowdragoneyes
Offline
The Mountains

Here's a neat trick I like to use to get reverbs and delays to sparkle sparkle as fuck on gameboy tracks:

1. Record your mix onto a stereo channel

2. Set up a bus from that channel to a stereo aux channel

3. Before adding your reverb to the aux channel, throw an EQ plugin on the aux channel, and lop off all the low end and some of the low-mids (can't say up to which frequencies specifically, check this by soloing the track)

4. Do the same thing for your delay bus.

5. Send a tasteful amout of your choosing to each aux channel. This is way better than putting a reverb/delay plugin on the audio track itself, and is common practice

What happens as a result of this is your kick and bassline won't get verb'd or delay'd, because the audio will hit the EQ plugin before it hits the effects.

It goes without saying there are diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks but this is what I do on my tracks 100%.

egr
Offline
Abandoned on Fire

That sounds like some really good advice.  It probably helps with "loudness" and compression since you're not doubling up on the low end?  I will keep this in mind, definitely.

Rainbowdragoneyes
Offline
The Mountains

What this does is prevents the mix from sounding like a cloudy mud poop. For 4onthefloor dance tracks, if you had a kick drum that was super reverbed and delayed, it would not punch you in the face nearly as hard. Basically by utilizing this trick, only your leads and arps n shit are getting reverb and delay, and holy shit you didn't have to record everything seperately.

aphasia
Offline

There are some reverbs as well that have a lo-cut inside their structure so be sure to check this.

I know the one in ableton does.


As a rule you should DEFINITELY cut off from like 100hz downwards if it's going to reverb. At the least.

Rainbowdragoneyes
Offline
The Mountains

Correct, which is good for shaping your reverb sound, but by hitting the EQ before it gets to the reverb, there won't be any low end in your audio signal, so you might play with the reverb's eq settings for even beefier results

smiletron
Offline
Nashville, Tennessee

there are lots of ways to do this (high end sparkle without the murk in the lows), but it is a good result to achieve smile

Tanooki
Offline
Manchester,UK

Do you guys have any good links to websites which explains for beginners that explain a bit what you're all on about?
I'd fail at step 2 because i dont know about setting up a bus lol, but i am interested in making my sounds sound 'better' so any help would be appreciated,

Last edited by Tanooki (Jan 12, 2010 12:16 am)

tRasH cAn maN
Offline

@Tanooki: Another definition could be aux sed/return.
What you do basically is tap some signal from one channel into another.
You might have seen knobs on a mixing desk labeled 'aux' or 'send' on each channel. If you turn up one of these you're sending the audio, either directly after the EQ stage (called pre) or after the channel fader (called post), out to a separate physical output. This output you can connect to the input of a reverb e.g. The output of the reverb can then be inputed to a new channel (or a return input which is basically a channel without eq, sends and fader).
The advantage of the above procedure is that you can tap the desired amount of reverb from all your channels as the signal from each and every channels aux/send 1 goes out the same output.

What Rainbowdragoneyes suggests is that you put an EQ before the reverb to cut some bass and mid. This is common practice in audio production to avoid muddiness in the mix.
So the signal flow would e something like this:

  Channel_1      Channel_2           --> Reverb_channel
      |              |               |         |
      v              v               |         v
     EQ              EQ              |         EQ
      |              |               |         | 
      v              v               ^         v
    Send------>----Send->-EQ->Reverb-|       Send
      |              |                         |
      v              v                         v
      |              |                         |
      |              |                         |
      |              |                         |
      |              |                         |
      |              |                         |
    Volume        Volume                    Volume
    fader         fader                     fader
      |              |                         |
      |              |                         |
      v              v                         v
           -M    A    I    N    M    I    X-

Yeah, my ascii art sux, but I hope you get the picture. wink

aphasia
Offline
Tanooki wrote:

Do you guys have any good links to websites which explains for beginners that explain a bit what you're all on about?
I'd fail at step 2 because i dont know about setting up a bus lol, but i am interested in making my sounds sound 'better' so any help would be appreciated,

Check out Computer Music or Sound On Sound. Computer Music is more aimed at people with less experience so start with that.

What software are you running on your computer?

Saskrotch
Offline
Chicago IL

i just cant get behind digital reverb. it always sounds mad corny to me

infradead
Offline
Tacoma WA
Saskrotch wrote:

i just cant get behind digital reverb. it always sounds mad corny to me

so you have a 5'x8' steel plate hanging in your room for that sweet plate verb sound?

Rei Yano
Offline
California

pretty good advice here!

Anamanaguchi
Offline
New York City

MOAR!!!!

Was literally asking about this three days ago while doing a demo of a new track

Tanooki
Offline
Manchester,UK

THANKS alot guys! I usually write music in ableton live and sometimes LSDJ or both.

chunter
Offline
Brunswick, GA USA

There are reasons to use the reverb filtered to only reverberate the bass- this was a question that was asked of me some time ago and since I was on the spot I think I answered it incorrectly.

Want to make that big "BEWM!!!" sound from the Lion King movie title?  Take a thump sound of any kind and put it through a reverb set on gigantic and filtered so it's only sending 400hz or lower.  My thump of choice is a Roland drum machine sample, but you can really use anything.

Otherwise, when reverb is for sweetening and not for effect, chop its lows and keep it subtle.  You should literally barely hear it.

Last edited by chunter (Jan 12, 2010 8:42 pm)

aphasia
Offline

When producing a song on the computer or when it's stems of a game boy/c64 song then what I do is this;

Lower all faders
Raise the Kick, Snare and Bass to a level about a third of the way up the faders and balance them accordingly
Raise other drum sounds and balance against previous
Raise chords/arps and balance again
Raise Melodic parts going from aux melodies to lead melody and balance again
Review all parts, at this point the kick & snare usually need to come up slightly
Take a break, come back and tweak
Put a reverb on the send set to a room or maybe a hall depending on the sparsity of the track (more dense, smaller space)
Put a send device on each track (I do this in renoise usually but all DAWs have this feature
Send each part in the reverse order to the faders being raised to the reverb so that you can hear the effect and then back the level off from there slightly
Do not send bass or kick to the reverb