Beep you want it to be post fader. This means its proportional to the fader level. Otherwise you will be forced to readjust the return every time you move the track fader. 
 
One can write an entire book on reverb. Its that deep a subject. The only simple advise I will give to new users is too much can be downright awful. This is not something you or the old timers would fall into. There is the problem of using too many types that make the music indistinct and muddy. "We have them so lets use them" is the justification for this. Anyone can fall into this problem.
 
With Mix Recall its easy to do an A/B to see what the reverb is doing. 

I like the way Mike Senior approaches reverb in his book, with different reverbs set up for:
 
1 - Size
2 - Blend
3 - Spread
4 - Tone
5 - Sustain
 
I find that 1 & 2 are usually enough for my needs.

Lots of good advice in this thread.

One thing I'll add is that even if you are using reverb "just" to get everything to sound coherent like it was all recorded in the same room it's a bad idea to put much or any reverb on the kick drum and bass. They can lose punch, muddy up and smear very quickly unless dry or very nearly so.

Gently high-passing your room reverb around 100Hz can be a good idea for the same reason, as can low passing it if it gets harsh and metallic.

tlw
Lots of good advice in this thread.

One thing I'll add is that even if you are using reverb "just" to get everything to sound coherent like it was all recorded in the same room it's a bad idea to put much or any reverb on the kick drum and bass. They can lose punch, muddy up and smear very quickly unless dry or very nearly so.

Gently high-passing your room reverb around 100Hz can be a good idea for the same reason, as can low passing it if it gets harsh and metallic.

Very good advice.  

I'm using verb less and less,
instead opting for delays.
the denser the mix,
the less reverb
 
(2) delays, 
one short slapback for 'ambience' ala drums, percussion, acoustic guitars;
one longer for music tracks and vox

I've been working very hard on all this today and yes indeed this is all great advice. I've been veering off into dealing with some other issues in the mix that needed sorting (like vocal EQ/Comp) but have been messing with my newly created verb busses. Currently just a "Main" overall verb bus and now one specifically for all the vocals because I really want them "outside the bandroom" (like a pop song I guess... except over top of a metal track). That's all working rather well.
 
tlw... Thanks specifically for the heads up about keeping the bass and kick out of the verb. I had already been keeping the bass out of it but I figured the kick should be in there since you'd hear those naturally in a room but yeah... I want it clear and cutting so no verb on the kick. The virtual "room" mic from the sampler can deal with that but maybe I'll even yank it out of there if it sounds better.
 
All the ideas and concepts so far are great. I will probably try a few wetter effect style reverb delays for specific things on this but mostly I just wanted the yelling, pounding and shredding to step back a few feet from listerner's perspective.
 
One thing that is annoying me though and I could use a bit of help with is how to Solo specific instuments properly with and without reverb (and not hear all the verb coming from the other instruments).
 
Let me explain...
 
Using sends on everything and sending them to a reverb bus of course results in you being able to hear all that stuff in the reverb bus. It also makes it so that when you solo a track you hear that soloed track AND whatever busses have sends going to them. Ya? I'm sure everyone is familiar with this.
 
Is there any way I can make it so
 
a) when I solo a track I ONLY hear that track and none of my busses being fed by sends? Currently I have to solo the track then mute my reverb busses. It's a bit annoying and screws up the a/b effect. As I add more verb/delay/compression/etc busses with sends this will obviously become a much more annoying problem.
 
b) when I solo a track that has a send feeding a bus (like a reverb bus) that I can hear ONLY that track in the bus (so all other tracks feeding the bus aren't heard in the bus) on top of the actual track? So let's say Tracks 1, 2 and 3 all have sends going to bus A. When I solo track 1 I want the send signal from Tracks 2 and 3 silenced in the bus while the send from track 1 remains audible along with the main output of track one.
 
Hard to explain but essentially I'd just like to be able to solo a track and turn the effect bus on/off and only hear the effect being applied to that specific track. Currently I hear the effect on all the tracks that are being sent to it which isn't helpful.
 
Make sense?
 
Anyway... thanks doods. Keep 'em coming. Great thread.
 

sharke
Don't forget mono plates, great for guitar and vocals. Sometimes you don't want any stereo reverbs at all - they can after all create muddiness and clutter if used too much. An LCR mix with nothing but mono reverbs can sound really clean and tight. You don't have to have an instrument's reverb panned in the same position in the instrument - experiment with panning a left-panned instrument's reverb hard right, and vice versa. 
 

But in order to do this, you'd need to set the reverbs up as inserts on mono tracks, not as a send, right?  To my knowledge all buses in Sonar are stereo, so if you send a mono track to a stereo bus with a reverb, the dry signal will still be mono but the wet reverb will be stereo, right?  Or do you just use the interleave button on the reverb bus to keep it mono?

streckfus

sharke
Don't forget mono plates, great for guitar and vocals. Sometimes you don't want any stereo reverbs at all - they can after all create muddiness and clutter if used too much. An LCR mix with nothing but mono reverbs can sound really clean and tight. You don't have to have an instrument's reverb panned in the same position in the instrument - experiment with panning a left-panned instrument's reverb hard right, and vice versa. 
 

But in order to do this, you'd need to set the reverbs up as inserts on mono tracks, not as a send, right?  To my knowledge all buses in Sonar are stereo, so if you send a mono track to a stereo bus with a reverb, the dry signal will still be mono but the wet reverb will be stereo, right?  Or do you just use the interleave button on the reverb bus to keep it mono?

I just set the interleave on the bus to mono. Then I pan it either left, right and center.

tlw
Lots of good advice in this thread.

One thing I'll add is that even if you are using reverb "just" to get everything to sound coherent like it was all recorded in the same room it's a bad idea to put much or any reverb on the kick drum and bass. They can lose punch, muddy up and smear very quickly unless dry or very nearly so.

Gently high-passing your room reverb around 100Hz can be a good idea for the same reason, as can low passing it if it gets harsh and metallic.

I have no trouble reverbing the bass as long as the reverb return is high passed high enough. If you're high passing above say 400Hz, which is essential to prevent reverbs from muddying your mix, then sending a little of the bass to the reverb won't necessarily be a bad thing. All you're sending is the bass's higher frequency into the verb, which depending on the bass can reach anywhere up to 2kHz+. So you're not affecting the low thump or boom of the bass, just the harmonics and pick sound etc.

Yes, high-passing a reverb and sending the bass to it works fine. As for the high-pass frequency and slope, that's a matter of an "artistic decision" really. A complex mix with lots of different components is likely to need different treatment to a vocals/guitar/bass/drums blues band or a string quartet.

It really depends on (a) the result you're after and (b) the track/mix in question.

Personally I distinguish between reverb applied to specific instruments/sounds for effect (e.g. spring reverb on a guitar amp or a prominent reverb added to synth swooshes) and a more general "glueing" reverb. The latter being the kind of reverb you get when you record a bunch of instruments/singers in a room, whether that room is a studio, concert hall or a cathedral.

There's more than one way of getting good results is what it comes down to. In some ways working with VSTis or synths is like working with the 70s/80s style almost anechoic "dead" recording rooms. All reverb gets added artificially, but fortunately modern reverbs are far better at sounding convincing than the hardware digital reverbs of 30 years ago. And we can have as many instances of a reverb processor as our cpu and RAM can stand at no extra cost.