"Correct" or natural placement of reverb

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Thousand Ways
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Joined: 18 Jun 2015
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15 Jul 2020

I'd be interested to read any thoughts on how you'd deal with reverb in this situation:

Let's say that you have three instruments on a track: drums, panned to centre; a synth, panned hard-right; another synth, panned hard-left. Each of these instruments has reverb.

Two options for placing the reverb in the stereo picture:

1) reverb for all three instruments is placed dead-centre

2) separate reverb on each instrument, in each case panned in the same direction as the instrument itself

Is either of these placements "correct" or more natural? I'm not sure how reverberation behaves in a real room or hall. To me, having one global reverb (or even separate reverbs) all panned to centre makes the instruments that are panned left and right sound too "out on a limb", and too far away from the reverb that they're generating.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. Perhaps some Reason users have a way that they usually place reverb in the stereo picture?

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motuscott
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15 Jul 2020

It ain't cheap but SoftTube Tsar-1 does stereo panning. I think.
https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack ... -1-reverb/
Who’s using the royal plural now baby? 🧂

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selig
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15 Jul 2020

There is a third way, where you use one reverb in stereo and the panning of the instruments is reflected in the panning of the reverb. To do this you need a true stereo reverb, which you can easily build using two RV7000s if you don't have one. Using send 1 as an example, take the left out and feed the left in to the first RV7000, and the right out and feed the left in of the second RV7000. Similarly for the returns, take the left out of the first RV7000 into the left return #1 and the left out of the second RV7000 into the right return #1. You can put the reverbs in a combinator and assign the rotaries to the reverb knobs so you can control both units from one place.
So basically you have one reverb for the left, one for the right - just like if you had one EQ for the left and one for the right, or a delay, or whatever. The point is how this will respond to a stereo input.

To understand how to make the most of this setup, start with a mono source like a Subtractor. Get it making a short plucky sound and playing a sequence of notes. Turn on Send One and set it's level to 0 dB (unity). Listen to the reverb - it's centered, but is still stereo, just like if you had a speaker in a big room. Now pan it left, and notice what happens - the reverb ALSO goes to the left! Same for panning right. A pan of 75% or so keeps some of the opposite side reverb in the mix and may sound more natural than hard panned sounds (if realism is what you're going for).

Variations: you can modify the combinator to minimize the extreme panning effect by adding cross feed. This allows you to send a little bit of signal to the opposite channel even when hard panned, spreading the reverb out a bit and making it feel more natural. This is because in a real space, even a source that is directly to your left will still produce some reverb from your right. Make sense?
Taking it further, another variation I like is to reverse the reverb and the dry signal, so when you pan left the reverb goes right and vice versa. This allows you to "spread" a mono source by putting it's dry signal on one side and it's wet on the other. The way this works, you can use a single send for signals panned left as well as right (and center) and the reverb will always move to the opposite side in proportion to the way the dry signal is panned on any channel.
And finally, with either setup, using auto-panning further enhances the effect especially with longer reverb times since the reverb will linger in the location it was initially produced even as the dry signal moves to a new position. Adding pre-delay with any of these setups further enhances the effect. Experiment and enjoy!
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Loque
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15 Jul 2020

100% correct can it only be, if you build the room and record it.

What i do, is thinking how a real room could sound? Lets say, the sound comes in the left front of a closed room:
* Early reflection from left
* Late reflection from back and right
* I, as audience, stand in front of a open room and will get the sound directly. To make things easier, i stand at the same position as the sound, so i
** get the sound full dry
** hear the reflections with its reverb tails, while the "left" is shorter and the other ones are "longer"
** Now think of the upcoming reflections bouncing around in the room. This means, i am hearing feedback of the early-reflections and reverb tails

Maybe you already got a clue, how you can build such a thing with delays and reverbs. To make things easier, the reverbs often have early reflections. Sometimes they also have "walls" with additional reflections. The RV7000MKII has rooms with several wall settings. To get close to a "real" reverb you need to position your audio and feed it into the reverb.

The problem may the early-reflections, so you may need reverbs for the right position and distance and hopefully you can also edit late reflections (AFAIR you can do this in RV7000MKII too).

But tbh, you never can get 100% close with this. So you need a real recording or a good recording for a convolution reverb, which is the best solution for real sounding reverbs. They often come with front, back, left, right variants.

And in the end, you just need a good algorithm and processing.

If you want to go this rabbit hole, good luck! Or just add a freaking reverb and enjoy the lush sound.

Still waiting for a good implementation, where i can place my audio in a room and get all those things done (note, that a sound in a higher distance sounds different when its close!). There are some things out there for 3D audio, and also free ones. I just tried the free ones and the results were more or less "meehhh....".
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Thousand Ways
Posts: 252
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16 Jul 2020

Many thanks for the replies. I hadn't actually considered creating a single stereo reverb unit.

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selig
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16 Jul 2020

Thousand Ways wrote:
16 Jul 2020
Many thanks for the replies. I hadn't actually considered creating a single stereo reverb unit.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k36yw105t2xz4 ... b.zip?dl=0
Here's one I just made while explaining this concept. I added a new feature to the way I used to do this, which is "CrossFeed". This allows you to keep the hard panned sources from feeding ONLY the left/right reverb. At the far left setting it is "full" stereo, at the center it is full mono (like a single RV7000), and at the far right it is reversed stereo which is very useful for creating a stereo spread on mono sources as it's reverb appears opposite of the panning of the mono source. Center panned will always be center with any setting.
I didn't change any internal RV7000 settings, so this is simply the default (reset) Hall algorithm. Make sure to change both reverbs in the combinator, and explore things like adding pre delay and using delay algorithms or extremely long/short reverbs.

If you are super adventurous you could adapt this to create a 3D reverb by adding a front/back control which would essentially crossfade between a pair of early reflection reverb settings (front) to a pair of darker long tail setting reverbs (rear). This would allow you to pan sources not only left to right but also front to back. Take it even further by using it as an insert and adding more wet and less dry for the "rear" settings, to really enhance the effect. There's probably even more that can be done to create a full 3D "natural" space model, and if anyone does this please share here!
Selig Audio, LLC

BedsitAudio
Posts: 14
Joined: 16 May 2020

16 Jul 2020

selig wrote:
16 Jul 2020
Thousand Ways wrote:
16 Jul 2020
Many thanks for the replies. I hadn't actually considered creating a single stereo reverb unit.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k36yw105t2xz4 ... b.zip?dl=0
Here's one I just made while explaining this concept. I added a new feature to the way I used to do this, which is "CrossFeed". This allows you to keep the hard panned sources from feeding ONLY the left/right reverb. At the far left setting it is "full" stereo, at the center it is full mono (like a single RV7000), and at the far right it is reversed stereo which is very useful for creating a stereo spread on mono sources as it's reverb appears opposite of the panning of the mono source. Center panned will always be center with any setting.
I didn't change any internal RV7000 settings, so this is simply the default (reset) Hall algorithm. Make sure to change both reverbs in the combinator, and explore things like adding pre delay and using delay algorithms or extremely long/short reverbs.

If you are super adventurous you could adapt this to create a 3D reverb by adding a front/back control which would essentially crossfade between a pair of early reflection reverb settings (front) to a pair of darker long tail setting reverbs (rear). This would allow you to pan sources not only left to right but also front to back. Take it even further by using it as an insert and adding more wet and less dry for the "rear" settings, to really enhance the effect. There's probably even more that can be done to create a full 3D "natural" space model, and if anyone does this please share here!
Your super informed and detailed posts are a danger to my productivity. I just got the urge to build a custom reverb configuration with fine controls of *everything*. Fortunately, I don't have a 5.1 setup at the moment, or it (custom 3D reverb) would become a huge time thief.

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