Tecnology and music

Tools for Mixing: Reverb

By Ernie Rideout
Of all the tools we talk about in the Tools for Mixing articles here at Record U, reverb is unique in that it's particularly well suited to make it easy for you to create clear mixes that give each part its own sonic space.
Reverb derives its uniqueness from the very direct and predictable effect it has on any listener. Since we humans have binaural hearing, we can distinguish differences in the time between our perception of a sound in one ear and our perception of the same sound in our other ear. It's not a big distance from ear to ear, but it's enough to give our brains all they need to know to immediately place the location of a sound in the environment around us.
Similarly, our brains differentiate between the direct sound coming from a source and the reflections of the same sound that reach our ears after having bounced off of the floor, ceiling, walls, or other objects in the environment. By evaluating the differences in these echoes, our brains create an image accounting for the distances between the sound source, any reflective surfaces, and our own ears.
The good news for you: It's super easy to make your mixes clearer and more appealing by using this physiological phenomenon to your advantage. And you don't even need to know physiology or physics! We'll show you how to use reverb to create mixes that bring out the parts you want to emphasize, while avoiding common pitfalls that can lead to muddiness.
All the mixing tools we discuss in this series — EQ, gain staging, panning, and dynamics — ultimately have the same goal, which is to help you to give each part in a song its own sonic space. Reverb is particularly effective for this task, because of the physiology we touched on earlier. As with the other tools, the use of reverb has limitations:

1. It cannot fix poorly recorded material.
2. It cannot fix mistakes in the performance.
3. Any change you make to your music with reverb will affect changes you've made using the other tools.

As with all songwriting, recording, and mixing tools, you're free to use them in ways they weren't intended. In fact, feel free to use them in ways that no one has imagined before! But once you know how to use them properly, you can choose when to go off the rails and when to stay in the middle of the road, depending on what's best for your music.
Before we delve into the details of using reverb in a mix, let's back up a step and talk about what reverb is.

Reverb: Cause and Effect

At its most basic, a reverberation is an echo. Imagine a trombonist standing in a meadow, with a granite wall somewhere off in the distance. The trombonist plays a perfect note, and an echo follows: