I'm trying to work on getting better with reverb and delay. I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of a good tutorial or something.
I'm not quite wrapping my head around whether to use 2 buses (one short and one long) and feeding everything into those to create a 'room' for my track or if I should be leaning more towards using individual reverbs and delays for things like snares etc.
I'm also really struggling to understand gain staging when using a reverb bus. I'm not sure if I should leave the fader at 0db on the bus and just use the sends to adjust level or if I should be using the bus fader for level. All of which (I think) messes with my gain staging for the bus.

Any help would be appreciated.

Kenny Gioia has a video called "Delay Explained" on Groove 3 that is fantastic. Eli Krantzberg has a video called "Reverb Explained" also on Groove 3. You can subscribe to Groove 3 for $15 a month with no commitment. As far as gain staging: I leave the effects buss at 0db and adjust levels with the channel send. I always automate sends to long delays. I use the effects buss fader(s) as a global gain if I feel things are too wet and I want to dial everything back.
 
Rocky

Depends on your style. Do you do organic music, e.g. folk/jazz/rock, or modern electronica/dance?
 
If the former, the longstanding practice has been to use two reverb busses, one with a short "roomy" tail and the other with a longer "hall" type tail. Yes, you're (mostly) trying to simulate a band playing in a real physical space with the short reverb, but also helping out the lead vocal with the long one.
 
If your style is the latter, sorry, I can't help. Best guess: use a single long reverb and dial it up until it's obviously too much, then add a little more.

https://youtu.be/Q4Hirnibn3M?t=323

RSMCGUITARI'm also really struggling to understand gain staging when using a reverb bus. I'm not sure if I should leave the fader at 0db on the bus and just use the sends to adjust level or if I should be using the bus fader for level. All of which (I think) messes with my gain staging for the bus.

Any help would be appreciated.

 
Personally I always keep my bus fader levels at 0dB and use the send levels on the tracks to control how much reverb/delay is applied
 

I mostly use sends to control reverb/delay levels if I'm using a seperate bus for them. The bus fader gets left at 0 unless the cumulative effect of lots of tracks running into it is pushing the reverb level too high on everything. Another problem with the single reverb approach is the plugin's input can get overloaded or pushed into distortion as the total gain it receives increases with the number of sends it receives. A gain plugin inserted before the reverb to reduce the signal hitting it can be useful if that happens. Adjusting a single gain plugin is much easier than adjusting lots of sends.

What I often end up doing is a mixture of approaches where I have a room reverb on an aux bus that's fed by sends so I can place everything in the same virtual room, but also delays and other reverbs on specific tracks which may be on busses or directly inserted into the track itself.

Using as few reverb and delay plugins as possible is in some ways a throwback to the per-DAW days when every effect required a corresponding piece of hardware, the number of sends was limited by the mixer and the track count by the mixer and tape machine. In other ways it's a bit of a continuation of the DAW approach used when computers couldn't handle many complicated resource-hungry plugins at a time so minimising the cpu usage was very important.

same as above: 2 reverb buses, one long one short, keep the buses at 0, adjust the send level to taste, unless it's creative then whatever goes

I use a combination of the sends and the bus fader for adjusting levels.  I get the relative mix with the sends usually with the reverb at 0dB so I can hear what the blend sound likes.  Then I dial back the bus fader to get the reverb level correct in the mix.

Same here, one long and one short reverb bus. However, for things like a snare, I still might have a separate reverb just on that track because it is usually a specialty reverb.
 
Dan

Thanks for all the info guys. This is great!