Curly Girly

Just a fun little noodle tonight. I was aiming to refocus the bass and bring it back in to the mix without it becoming mud after last nights noodle, all the while still attempting to retain high levels of reverb in the mix.

Thanks Mats_Nermark it's an area I feel I'm constantly learning with. I increasingly think it's super situational, there's no one-size-fits-all verb, so everything I'm doing right now uses a combination of reverbs.

My current thinking is it's a hierarchy, where there are three main levels of reverbs which are track, mix and master and their corresponding purposes are character, distance and polish.

So anything on the master bus needs to be really smooth and sweet sounding. e..g I've been using Capitol Chambers a lot because I love the sound there, it adds a little shimmer and air and some cohesion and it also adds just a tiny bit of character.

Then on the mix bus I like to keep it clean and not so characterful, more a second axis so I can use the panning tools but also push a track further back into the distance using the bus mix strength. Because it's on the bus it sounds like the same space for every track. It's not quite like actually creating more diffusion, but it's a good enough approximation that it can fool the mind into reading it as proximity.

Finally on the individual tracks I'm using it as effect, to add character. So e.g. I might insert a grainy junky sounding spring verb on a guitar, or use a cavernous sound on a percussion instrument, or a fully mixed verb on something I want to turn into a pad sound.