Dear Community, have some multitracks and when listening to stems or individual instruments I have impression of softness, kind of a silky sound which is difficult to describe as I'm not native english speaker. I wonder what are your thougths on this subject. Mine are that this sounds like a short room/studio reverb put on mix bus. Would be grateful for your thoughts.

 

Why don't you upload one of the stems or instruments so we get an impression?

 

Last edited: Feb 12, 2021

Here are a short samples..

 

In the past it was a pretty popular trick to have a reverb on the master bus and it's still used today by some. I remember seeing a video with Andrew Schepps explaining why he started using a reverb on the mixbus to get some glue back because he apparently doesn't use any buscomp!

Edit: Found it

 

Last edited: Feb 12, 2021

Thank you Arabian_jesus for this video, reverb used on a mix bus is on my mind since a while and it seems that when using properly it gives a litle sense of space and could help in getting rid of digital harshness but as I'm not experienced in mixing I appreciate ideas of these more experienced people here..

 

Reverb On Mixbus - It's cool, whatever works I guess. Used it several times to push some element to the back.

I added all the tracks to DAW and then I stuck.. what was I suppose to do again ? these aren't the same length, so it's not stems from a project right ?

lol. I think Im missing the point.

 

These samples were taken from one project and are from different parts of a song so they do not goes together. I uploaded them just as an example

 

Ah, i see. Listening to them (solo and together), in my opinion, there's plenty of reverb in each of them. A little too much for my liking, but Im not familiar with the music style.

Are you going to add more (short) reverb in the mixbus for all of them ?

 

This tracks are not mine but taken from a commercial project I had a chance to remix and you right they are wet and I have a feeling that on top of that there is a short softening reverb on each track but I could be wrong and this is why I'm asking people here if it is a common practise for you to use short reverb at the end of a chain regardless individual fx track treatment

 

You can bring out Ambience by using Parallel Compression as well and blending it back in. Less cluttererd mix less mushy and cluttered low end.

 

May be it is simply a "stem" export.
And they put Insert reverb on ALL tracks.

When you export stems, you are supposed to DISABLE master.
But may be there was an error ...

You can remove excessive reverb with Transient Shaper plugins (there are free ones).

 

I think it is pretty common nowadays, for creative purpose, you'll get more flavours too. With all the resources (processing power, plugins) we have now, I don't see why not to use them in individual channel. A return channel for reverb is more to "glueing" stuff together and create a sense of everything been played in the same space, IMO it's always has to be there in every mix.

Me personally, i stopped just to "add reverb" long ago. I look at it as a tool to achieve thing. Space, sauce (ie. plate for some character), extend tails, push track back in the mix, glue, ambience etc. Doesn't matter it is a kick track, or even the 2bus.

you can do that before adding your own flavour of reverb at the mixbus if you want to i guess.

 

IMHO, these are all individual reverbs (and ofc delays), not a single one on the mixbus.

This is absolute common practise to give the instruments some depth and ambience. I rarely use a mix bus reverb, only when I think it's exactly what is missing. But I know some people do this all the time. As one of my former signatures said, your noise, your choice.

 

Yes! I feel that it works especially well when the recording of different instruments differ quite a lot in quality, for example if the guitars are recorded with amp sims and the drums are from SD3. Because the drums in SD3 are recorded with very expensive analog equipment in some of the best studios in the world and the guitars are just recorded directly into a interface with an amp sim they can sometimes sound so far from eachother in quality that they don't really sound very convincing together. A master reverb can really help to put the instruments in the same "space" in that case. Most of the magic is ofc done on the individual tracks but sometimes a reverb on the master bus can be the missing ingredient!

 

I knew this was a thing back in the day, but I was recently helping a young lad and he has Garageband on his 'phone.
I said "wow, that's a lot of verb on your master", and he was like "yeah, that's how the template is set-up"!
I found it strange that Apple would choose to do this.