Pure Reverb/Delay on the far sides of the 3D field

New Member, I recently left the session world somewhat behind to open up my own recording/teaching studio. I'm very familiar with the Pro Tools format, but to save cash, I went with Pro 9.0. I've been pretty happy with the audio quality. I pre w/a 1604 VLZ directly into my card and w/a little (lot!) of compression from FX-1. I have no doubt in my mind that this setup (a Neumann KM84 or U-87 and a Nirvana-like room wouldn't hurt a bit), can produce a Pro sound.

One of the coolest recording techniques I've been taught is keeping the 3D field free and open from 90% to 100% on both far right and left sides. These far ends are then open to only the processed reverb/delay of every single instrument in the mix ( no direct signal from anything, only reflections). I've seen this done in Pro-Tools through Aux sends in stereo and then panned, but I'm having trouble in 9.0 .

I need a little help here. your help is greatly loved on this end. I'm happy to be a member and look forward to helping any of you when I can !!!

Hi Larry,

I suppose my description was on the vague side. What I'm trying do is keep every instrument in the mix dry (in between 95% left to 95% right in the stereo pan field ). I,m keeping hard left and hard right wide open, with no instruments at all. I then want to send the "wet only" reverbs and delays from every instrument in the mix to these hard left & right places in stereo field.

I've been told that the front to back element of the 3D sterio field created with verbs and delays gets lost in the overall mix when an instrument's direct signal and wet signal are placed on top of one another and thus located in same exact place in the mix. I've also noticed that when every instruments wet-only signal is off to the far sides of the field, it seems to create the illusion that the reflections from the over-all mix, are coming off the left and right walls in whatever room you're in while listening. I know from years of tweaking my guitar rig that processing can give bad color and ruin the good work done by the people at Mesa Boogie, so seperation sounds awsome to me!!!

As far as the specific problem I was having, I was using the Aux. sends to deliver verb returned to the bus from an instrument like a guitar, placed right-mid-center in it's track pan placement(dry signal). I wanted to have the wet-only signal to go from the aux. to the hard left and right sides of the stereo field. With everything I did when messing around with this (having the dry track placed right-mid-center) the verb was not be evenly dispersed hard right and left, though it was wet-only.


I was told on the job today that most stereo reverb plugins send the wet-only signal hard panned to both left and right by design. I also was told by Cakewalk Tech to make a copies of an existing track and paste 2, then apply reverb to the 2 new tracks. On the new tracks, they said to go 100% wet 0% dry in both and hard pan both respectively. I'm worried that having so many tracks running verb individually will drag on the CPU too hard. I checked out the 9A and found it incredibly helpful in understanding the guts.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for contacting me.I'm new to the forum and, to be honest, I have not spent a ton of time on this side of the board. I get nervous when people ask me to be more specific, for I fear that when I do, it requires a person to miss an entire sitcom to listen!

Hope to chat again soon,
John