The Secret to Become a Master at Reverb (In Just 15 Minutes)

all right do you find Reaver confusing like sure it can make something sound like it's coming from a big cave but how are you supposed to use it and where does it fit into your song too much of it and your mix turns into a washed down mess too little and everything sounds dry and lifeless and then there's the pre- delay the Decay time and the diffusion like what do this even do well by the end of this you're going to know exactly what Reverb is and how to use it so that you can give

your tracks that depth and atmosphere and I'll even give you a few secret techniques like this one and this but anyway let's get into it okay so let's start this out with a question what is Reverb that's a terrible question mark But Reverb is the natural Echo that occurs when sound bounces off surfaces in a space so if I draw something here when you make a sound in a room right this is the the room and this is supposed to be you like yelling or something like that this is of course going to start reflecting

and bouncing off all of the surfaces of the room so the walls the ceiling the floor Etc which of course reflects back towards you and it creates the sense of depth and you might be like well what about Reverb plugins well Reverb plugins just simulate this effect digitally why would you want to use this in music production there's a ton of reasons in music production we can use this to create a sense of depth and atmosphere and make a sound sound less dry and flat so if I rais this beautiful drawing here you might have

heard the term mixing in 3D and this just means kind of trying to get your sounds in your track to fit in almost the three-dimensional space so some sounds might be in the front of the room some might be in the backgrounds and really it's kind of like we're fitting all these boxes into one bigger box you might be like well how does this apply to reverb well Reverb can help create this effect it might pull some sounds to the background for example so for example if we take this dry snare it almost sounds two-dimensional

like there's no depth to it but even with just a little bit of Reverb it opens up a whole new dimension that we can use in our song there are many types of reverbs there's room re Reverb there's chamber Reverb there's spring reverb plate Reverb and more we'll take a look at some more practical examples later so you know what Reverb is now right well now we need to look at how to use Reverb and the different controls let's see so I have this top Loop here from a track and we're going to apply Reverb

to this just as a quick example so this is the fruity Reverb 2 one of the default FL Studio plugins I'll do Ableton in a second as well and there are really four main controls here so the first one is the wet knob or the knob this just balances between the original sound and the Reverb effect I'll slowly turn it up so that you know what it sounds [Music] like you can hear that the Reverb gets more intense as we raise it up the next main control is the Decay which is just how long the

Reverb is so if we turn it all the way down just a super short Reverb right if we turn it all the way up it's going to last a lot longer before it fades out the third main parameter is the pre- delay this is just the gap between the original sound and when the Reverb starts playing so if we turn it up here you can hear that it gets delayed by a few milliseconds if we turn it all the way up takes a whole second for the Reverb to actually start playing and you might be

like well why would I want to use this sometimes you might want to separate your Reverb from your sounds just a little bit for example if you have a snare that has some rever on it and that Reverb is washing it out a little bit too much you can use the pre- delay to kind of separate that initial transient from it and therefore it might sound a lot more clean the final parameter is just the size here so this is how big or small the Reverb is I'll play and then slowly increase the size so

you can hear the difference so it's a little bit hard to hear but the room of the Reverb just gets bigger all right so now let's look at Reverb and Ableton it's basically the same thing I have this track right here Shout Out J sounds I've been working on this with him I'll play it for you real [Music] quick anyway we're going to apply the Ableton stock Reverb once again to the top Loop and it's basically the same thing but with a few different parameters but if we look look here we have the dry wet

knob we have the Decay the size the pre- delay one thing I forgot to cover is the high and low cut of the Reverb the FL Studio Reverb has this as well and it's where you can EQ the actual Reverb itself and not the original sound if we turn on low cut for example it's filtering out the low frequencies of the Reverb and this can help your sound sound more clean and same with high cut except the opposite so of course it will cut the high frequencies of the Reverb so you can adjust these depending

on how you want your Reverb to fit into the track and how bright you want it to be the color and character that you want it to have Etc it's basically an EQ for the Reverb and if you're confused on what an EQ is go check this video and for these extra param over here the reflect for example this just controls the early Reflections reflections of the Reverb like the early sound wave bounces in the room basically turn it up and it will sound a lot more roomy and the fuse controls how spread out the

Reverb tail is these also come with their own EQ and additional controls which I'll probably cover in a different video just cuz I want to keep this as simple as possible but anyway you might be like well why does this Reverb have the diffusion and the reflection controls and the FL Studio one has none of that but if we drag in a valala vintage verb it has all these different random controls like early what does that mean or late or depth or base multi covering all of these in depth would probably take a whole new

video so I might make a more detailed version in the future but for now I'm just going to keep it simple all Reaver plugins are going to be different try experimenting with them playing around with them and just seeing what each parameter does maybe even reading the manual that it comes with so you know what Reverb is you know how to use it and now it's a matter of where and when do we use it of course as I mentioned before we can use Reverb to fill up space in the track as well as add

some atmosphere and some depth to it it can even be used to kind of glue sounds together and also create some special effects which we'll look at later but anyway let's look at some practical examples in do for our first example here I got this collab that I'm working on with a few people and we made this pretty rough intro with the lace and a pad I'll play it for you real quick but it's missing a lot of that depth and space it almost sounds two dimensional and so what we're going to do is add

some Reverb to that pad to fill up that space and to give it that atmosphere that it needs so for this pad I'll use valala room it's probably my favorite classic reav plugin I'll slowly increase the mix here and I want you to listen to How much depth this adds to it [Music] [Music] so we probably don't want it all the way to 100% but probably somewhere around here it's a pretty subtle difference and it's going to be a a little bit hard to hear just because the synth pad is more focused on the mids

and it doesn't have that much highs so if you go to serum and kind of loosen up on the filter here then you can really hear it there we go once again I'll slowly increase the mix so you can hear it so like I said we just want a little bit bit more depth and atmosphere so I'll put this around 30% we can also adjust the Decay and the high cut another example would be this beautiful piano Melody that we made listen to this [Music] once again it's missing a lot of depth so let's go

to the mixer in FL Studio and we can apply some Reverb to this now originally I did have a Guitar Rig on this piano just for kind of a unique effect and this did have some Reverb on it so I'll play it again adds a little bit more depth and character to it I think it has some distortion on it as well and maybe let's try fruity Reverb just for a little bit more depth now I was never a huge fan of this plugin just because it sounds a little bit cheap in my opinion but

we can go with it for [Music] now beautiful so let's do a little before and after if we take these off and turn them [Music] on pretty subtle difference but adds that atmosphere and that depth to it all right let's look at another example so I have this older project from a few years ago [Music] [Music] it's kind of a melodic cyber Punk type of track anyway I think the snare sounds a little bit dry what if we just try and apply some Reverb to the snare so right now the kick in the snare sounds

like this so with that of course let's apply some Reverb this time I'm going to use valala vintage verb and it's called vintage verb because it emulates vintage technology looks a little bit complicated but once again I'm going to keep it simple it's same controls here the Decay The Mix maybe I'll turn the Decay to about 1 second and the mix down and from here we can just kind of adjust it so I'm cutting some of the high so it's not too bright with this Reverb we can choose the mode as well so for example

plate or room anyway I'm going to stick with these settings here except maybe change the color so I'll change it to now and this is the more modern sounding Reverb it's a lot more bright so we can do a little before and after here [Music] [Music] of course it just helps the snare feel less dry but also a little bit more glued into the track so if you get anything from this you can use Reverb to add more space and depth to a track and even help it sound more glue together so you know what

Reverb is you know how to use it you know when to use it but now we need to look at when not to use it it because this is also very important as a summary if you're applying Reverb to a specific sound and that's causing your mix of sound very muddy and messy then don't use it so back to this track here that I showed you [Music] earlier there's a lot of Reverb going on especially in these more high frequency sounds like the vocal chop but that's okay it's not messing with the mix the most

common example of when not to use Reverb is on the kick and the Basse I'm going to show you if we just apply Reverb to the kick on the default settings as well as the Basse listen to how it [Music] sounds you have all this rumbling and messiness that's going on at the bottom and of course we don't want that now the thing is you can break this Rule and apply Reverb to your kick or your base if you want to but you have to do it in a specific way that it actually sounds good

so for example if I were to apply this to the kick I'd probably cut the lows and it would probably be in a specific setting or style where it actually sounds good I can't really show you right now just cuz that's a little bit too specific but hopefully that makes sense check how the Reverb is affecting your mix and make sure it's not messing with it or washing it out all right and now I just want to show you a few my favorite techniques with Reverb so for example I have this serum pluck right here

just a simple sine wave with some noise and in FL Studio we have Patcher and we can use this to send the Reverb through some crazy effects so for example this pit shifter and delay and then we get this cool [Music] effect pretty cool beautiful you can recreate this Patcher preset just by looking at it by the way totally up to you I'm just doing a Shameless plug here if you want to work oneon-one with me and take your music to the next level check the first link in the description I think it'll be really

valuable anyway I think it just sounds really cool now a similar effect to this is Solaris or Solaris however you pronounce it this is a completely free Reverb plugin it's very very bright and it shifts the pitch of the Reverb kind of like what I just showed you sounds like this it's very very similar to crystallizer if you've ever heard of it so the last technique is the Reverb sweep technique and this is my personal favorite I use it in every single track so this track right here you might remember it if you've been watching

me for a little bit [Applause] specifically on these saw cords here I'm automating the Reverb to create these really cool sweeps this is what it sounds [Music] like right here you might be like well how are you doing that this is how all I'm doing is taking the fruity Reverb 2 turning the decay all the way up and automating the wet [Music] creates those really cool sweeping effects and when you layer this with the glass breaking effect it sounds really [Music] cool really hope you enjoyed this video and hopefully kind of cleared up some things

about Reverb I really just wanted to make a very simple like crash course on reverb if you want to please subscribe it would help me retire my parents and also if you want to check the first link in the description if you want to take your music to the next level anyway I'll see you in the next one peace