Stereo Reverb Question

That shows how limited my education in sound mixing is..... I really never even thought about it....panning a reverb that is....

I simply pop in a reverb to a track.... and it gets panned...(I guess) with the main signal in that track...like a guitar. In a buss, I tend not to pan a buss so it stays centered, but the tracks going in are panned, and stay that way.

I rarely add reverb in the master buss. If I do it's minimal and centered as well.

Hi quantumeffect,

I agree that this dicussusion is a little confusing (page 436). 

What Guitarhacker posted is what I believe happens with the default (?) option that plugins follow the track pan.  I'm in Linux now and cannot easily check.  If this is how you are set up, you might want to use the stereo width to narrow some instruments; the reverb "center" would correspond to the track "center" which may be to the left or to the right.

The basic problem is that early reflections tend to come from the same place as the instrument whereas later and later reflections (reverb tail) come from virtually everywhere, assuming that the reverb time is long enough.  If reverb times are short, one should consider narrowing the reverb field (if it's wide) and pan as the track does.  What to do with long ones is tricky.  A long reverb with few early reflections can sound really wrong if panned.

IMO the best thing to do is to convolve the instrument sound with acoustically modelled IR's or sets of IR's taking position into account in detail, but that's not easy to do, practically speaking impossible.  For this case, everything comes from where it's supposed to come from.

We've discussed this at length somewhere on this forum before, but not specifically Izhaki's chapter IIRC.  If search worked better, I'd try to find it for you....

Regards,
Dave Clark
 

Hi quantumeffect,

I believe he's talking about so-called "true stereo."  The unit he used to create those tracks can do "true stereo." 

In Figure 23.11, he shows a coincident pair of mics.  Each signal could be (and I conclude is) sent to a stereo reverb, producing a left and a right reverb channel for each input.  These can separately be panned.  In Figure 23.10, he shows two small circles with the label "Reverb" pointing to each.  There is one on each side of the blackened circle labelled "Snare."  To me, this is depicting "true stereo" where each channel is reverb'd into a stereo channel that can be panned, just as he states.  Because these are panned separately and away from the snare, masking should be lessened (a presumption), just as he described initially in page 434 when discussing the trick of moving a mono reverb away from the direct signal.

Regards,
Dave Clark

Edit: Now let's assume that only one mic is used and a stereo reverb is produced.  One can STILL separate these into two MONO reverb signals and pan them separately.
 

You can create variety in how you manage your reverb returns in a mix. Say you have got 3 reverbs all with stereo outputs then we assume they all have to be returned to the mix the same way but not so.

The reverb we hear from our monitors extends a bit further out than the perimeters of your monitors.

You can return one reverb to the normal hard left/right setting. Another could be brought into say 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. This reverb will take up a slightly different space. I dont minding putting one of the reverb returns through Waves Stereo Imager and taking it out a bit wider too for lush ambient pads etc. Keeps pads and their reverbs well away from central images.

Creating complete mono reverbs is great too. Two cheap stereo reverbs (or outputs) will sound better when added and converted to mono. Mono reverb can go in the same place as a single mono sound eg sound and reverb at 11 o'clock. Another nice thing to do is set a sound at say 10 o'clock and its mono reverb at 2 o'clock. This will create a sense of stereo but will keep quite separate from other things going on.  eg conga and mono reverb. They used to do this all the time in the good old days as the first reverbs were mono. Has anyone got the famous Yamaha R 1000 mono digital reverb? Its still handy on a snare or guitar lick etc.. (it has a filthy equaliser though!)

Spring reverbs are usually mono. I once built a dual spring unit and fed the mono signal to the transducers (send) of both springs and at the receiving ends got a makeshift stereo reverb. Don't have it now though but there are ways of creating the effect.

Its important to keep an eye on the EQ of all the reverb returns as well in your mix. That's how you can blend them better. But think of all the options now in terms of how you return your reverb returns. From complete mono, (and panned anywhere from hard left to right) all the widths from mono out to normal and then from normal out to very wide. If you dont mind how things sound in mono, you can go very wide with reverb returns.

Some reverb returns may occupy the poisition from hard left to 12 o'clock and others from 12 o'clock to hard right. Another way of returing two reverbs. Thats a lovely way to keep two reverbs quite separate from each other. Then you could start delaying some of the returns or a left channel compared to a right channel in the same return for some extra widening effect. (Sonar Channel Tools is real handy for these sorts of jobs.)

In the old days of recorders and (huge) mixers it was not uncommon for an effect like reverb to be returned to some extra channels rather then just a stereo return. The returns on mixers often did not have pan controls, you were expected to do any of that inside the effect preset.   But for those who wanted control over the pan, EQ, etc from the mix position you could get that if you used channels. Also, if the mixer had any automation on the channels that also gave you automation of the effect.  And, since there were a limted number of effects devices they were often reused so you had to print (bounce) the effects to tracks on the recorder.  Now you know why recorders and mixers needed so many channels.  So, anyway that's where folks started experimenting with the pan on effects returns.  
 
When the DAW came along everyone had to re-learn how to do things or learn how to duplicate what was done back then. There are still mix engineers who bounce some effects to tracks (either dual mono or stereo) so the mix still works like it did back then. Many effects have envelopes now so you can automate all that but old habits die hard.  I still find myself printing (bounceing) some of the more complex effects to audio tracks out of fear that I might not have that plugin next time I redo my DAW install.  Same with software synths. It's just comforting to know all the audio is in tracks and backed up "frozen" like I had it.  This also makes remixing on a different brand of DAW (like Po'Tools) a snap. All you have to do is import the tracks and you are most of the way there. No looking for plugins that are "close to" the ones you had and trying to figure out how to adjust