I heard someone said that you should set the FX (reverb and delay, of course) mix knob to 100% Otherwise, your mix will be muddy, he said.
Is it true?

 

If he phrased it this way, the simple answer is, no. Neither the mix (which is wrong anyways), nor the sound.

Even if you set a send reverb to less than 100& wet, it's not gonna make the sound muddy, rather the opposite, you add the dry signal again.

On principle you should set all send FX to 100% wet, so you level the FX only, but if you dial in less, you don't make anything muddy.

 

There are many options you can have your FX.
As a send its usually 100%, not always, as an insert you adjust the mix knob, then there are options of pre/post fader, etc and you can also tweak and eq/compress FX to tailor it for your needs.

 

There is something called "send channel", which I particularly use to maintain a good ambience in my sounds, keeping them consistent ...

Send channels are simple, just pick an channel that are not being used and put an fx on it
Then, link something to it and adjust the ammount being sent to create an FX that doesn't mess up with the original sound, so you can, for example, eq only the reverb from the vocal, without affecting the original vocal itself

Send channels are normally used with Delays and Reverbs, If you have for example: A main vocal, a secondary vocal and an adlib, it is common for you to link all vocals to a single "send channel" with different values on the send knob (which is almost the same thing as the mixing knob).

I particularly find it a bit exaggerated to say that you "should never" change the value of knobs to less than 100%, we are making music, we do not have any pre-established rules, and several times I even leave some knobs at 50%, 25% (I use half-time on a melody with 25% mix pretty commonly) or even any less. Using "send knobs" can also be beneficial to keep your CPU usage low.

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2021

Yes, you should, otherwise Mixing Police is gonna arrest your ass.

 

Standard practices

- 100% mix if effect is receiving sound from a send, aux or bus.

- to taste if used as an insert

 

If minimum phase eq, it should be 100%. Because if not, it may create some sound problems. Linear phase should be ok with dry/wet. Here I talk about DAWs mix dry/wet slider(knob), everything is plugin/DAW dependent.
If pdc is bad implemented, you mix delayed signal with not delayed one.
For compressors it is uneasy. Do you mix compressed sound with volume compensated dry signal? I think plugins should have output for dry and output for wet for mixing.
All analysers and meter should be 0 wet (full dry). They will still show everything, but this will not truncate your sound from 64 bit float to 32 bit float, if they are so. Example, old smexoscope (didn't test newer one made with new dev kits). So, who wants another sound quality truncation because of just metering/analysing...

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2021

Thanks for every answer. I had a hard time picking the best answer.

 

i LOL'd at this