Using Verb and other FX(maybe)

[CEB]

Not sure if anyone wants to talk shop or not …  How do we approach using Verb?  

My perspective is one of a live performer. My gigs are often open air or larger halls.   In studio I just did what I was told.  
 

I think as keyboardist  we may be able to get away with more verb because we play a lot of pads.  But I posted on another thread “Reverb should be felt and not heard”.  That post was given without context and probably made no sense. 
 

I can’t play without any verb.  It feels too raw. I use just enough that it feels okay. I usually use Overb with a wet:dry ratio of around 9:91 to 12:88.   IEMs vs wedges has an impact on how much I use.  
 

I hear younger guitarist use beautiful digital reverbs.  They sound great alone but I think the tone washes out in a mix.  I tell them dry has more balls.  There are exceptions but to a large degree I approach synth leads the way I approach guitar. 
 

Most Roland and Yamaha presets are useless to me without stripping out effects.  
 

Hell I don’t know anything but I bet the forum has a lot of wisdom to share.  
 

Have a great week.  

[Baldwin Funster]

I go for a good plate verb. Digital of course. Or some clone if a good lexicon tiled room. The Zoom pedal ms70cdr has a great tiled room copy. It never gets muddy or in the way. Good for vocals too.

[Stokely]

I feel that in many venues, any verb is too much.  Because those spaces provide more than you want!  In other words, no matter what you do as a sound engineer, it's going to be a muddy mess for the audience.  

In some clubs full of people, not a problem.  I'm talking more some of the corporate spaces where they put us in a "ballroom" that is not great acoustically.  That said,  I have played in clubs that were all hard surfaces and were awful too.   A completely dry instrument ends up washed out by the time it hits all the corners, that type of nightmare place.   

So on top of that goes any reverb from instruments and vocals, magnifying the problem.

This issue is one reason I've considered going with a reverb pedal--I have a single control I can set based on the venue before the show starts.  I haven't, simply because my reverb levels are mostly turned down on my main patches anyway.  Basically, anything where it's important to hear the notes (some ethereal pad, not a big deal).

Believe you me since I use in-ears, dry keyboards or vocals sound pretty jarring.  I'm used to the dry vocals, both in studio and live, and I keep in mind that out front there's more "tail" to the sound--so it won't sound so unnatural as it does to me.   Same for keys if I turn off reverb.  The tendency is to overplay to fill up the jarring emptiness....

Our guitarist never takes his echo off, he wants to hear it, and there have been times where I've gone out front to check out the sound and yeah his guitar is a bit of a mess.  EQ won't help, more volume just makes it overpowering without clarity.  When he used a wedge it was a constant problem, now in in-ears he's happy but (IMO) the mix can suffer.  I wish he'd do what our singer has done for her in-ear vocal--she has a send that only returns into her monitors.  If the sound engineer wants to turn verb/delay up or down out front, she won't hear it and her reverb doesn't affect the mix.   Come to think of it, both the guitarist and I could do this, but it has a big drawback: it only works when we have our PA and mixer and our sound guy running things.

Caveat: depends on genre and tastes...but in general for pop and rock I kind of tend toward "enough verb to add space but not heard as an effect" pretty often.  The old trick of turning up the send until you barely hear the verb, then turning it down a notch    Maybe because of this, echoey venues bug me more than some.
 

[Mighty Motif Max]

For live, I go very dry for my patches, unless it's part of the sound I need. For example, I have the SuperKnob set as a reverb level for the piano layer in my piano/pads/electric guitar Performance that I use for most of my campus ministry gigs. It's nice to be able to go more ambient for exposed sections of a bridge, for example. But otherwise, generally, I go very dry on the reverb.

 

Mixing/studio stuff is another story. While obviously in a mix as a whole, overdoing reverb isn't a good thing, I will use reverbs as part of my sound design. I particularly like NI's Raum plugin - it doesn't try to be natural sounding, and it's a super useful tool for my production work. I think of it like running a synth through a guitar pedal - it becomes part of the patch, rather than a mixing tool.

[niacin]

Live, a little plate reverb, or spring reverb for Hammond where it's part of that sound, but no room reverb.  Yes it sounds a little odd in IEMs, but the sound is being projected via FOH into an actual room with it's own reflections, adding a simulated room to that might not be a good thing.

[MathOfInsects]

I used to be completely in the "the room is already reverb" camp. In the last few years I've started adding just the slightest bit of reverb to my live keyboard and organ sounds, a subconscious amount; it makes the patches feel more "real instrument"-like to me. Like you're in the room where those instruments are being played.

 

But lately I've been pushing it up until I notice it and then pulling back from there. It's not too far off from "start at 0 and add a smidge," but a different approach: Start where you can hear it and pull back just until you can't." It functions more as a clean boost than real reverb. It just draws out some of the realness in the piano samples and organ. (I don't like it on Wurly, though.) It's great on clav.



 

[brenner13]

Late last year I happened on a great deal for a Subsequent 37. Awesome synth, but dry, dry, dry…had to do something. 
I’ve got a set of five Digitech iStomps…really liked the red dual tune Coral…does an amazing chorus. But couldn’t get the reverbs to sound quite how I hear it in my head. Stumbled into little local music shop a couple towns over, during holiday shoppings and wound up with a UA Del/Verb pedal. Holy SMOKES that thing is about as fun to tweak as the Moog is. Dead simple to operate…Heck it only has one knob for Reverb, but it sounds fricking great! Well it does on the Moog, anyway. Haven’t used it live yet. 
 

Agreed that most synth/stage/workstation presets overkill the effects and they must be tweaked to sound better too my ears. Yep, my MODX stage piano has the super knob turned almost Off. If we happen to find ourselves in a super dry room, I can twist the knob to about 10 or 11 o’clock and, there ya have it…

 

Tonight I played around with GSI’s Genuine Sounds on iPad and simply pulled back the levels of the delay and verb on the Model D Rock present and had a grand time dinking around tonight. Those preset levels are just to let you know they have effects and stock levels purposely show them off a bit. Pulling them back to under 20% really cleaned up the tone yet still lets it breathe. Good stuff. 
 

No verb is boring. Too much verb is annoying. Just a taste is all it needs sometimes.

[Stokely]

Not so much for pianos, but for vocals, guitars and most other sounds I like to use delay.  Having tap tempo right there on the Nord stage 3 is nice as I can set the delay in time.     For vocals especially delay can preserve the clarity while still giving it a bit of space.   Same with synth leads.   Dense reverb in wedges can really aggravate feedback if you have problems with it.   

Anything goes!  Fx definitely can be fun.   Made a killer patch for "Gold Dust Woman" that has a rhodes running through a leslie (heretic!) with some delay (again, tap to put in time) and a pad that comes in slowly if you hold a key.   That's a pretty sparse song and that's another factor--if you have some fast rock tune with blazing guitars filling things up, drier is probably better if you want to have your part heard.
 

[Tusker]

15 hours ago, CEB said:

I can’t play without any verb.  It feels too raw. I use just enough that it feels okay.

 

Same here. I need it but a smidge goes a long way.

 

I'll add a distinction here that could help: the reverb component matters. I put the Early Reflections in to place the sound but the Room Tail is set at zero. I let the room tail arise from the room the jazz or pop band is performing in. This way my pianos aren't slamming into ear drums directly out of the speakers, but there is little to no trade-off with mud, because early reflections don't create much mud. Room tails are the mud culprits.

 

A delay can be used instead of reverb, to emulate that early reflection. The human ear desires spatial information and recoils from a completely dry sound.

 

My default reverb is Seventh Heaven which is not a convolution reverb based on an authentic impulse recording (IR)  It's a model constructed from delay networks. That's because I don't think it matters how "authentic" the early reflections are. You can mix and match. I do. Seventh Heaven has a knob for Early/Late reflection mix  (see below) which I set 100% to early, because I want only to place the sound.

 

 

Pianos could be placed further forward. Pads further back. That can be accomplished through reverb volume not the Early/Late mix. All sounds are getting only early reflections because the room we are performing in will provide enough (or too much!) tail.

 

One exception to this approach is with a very atmospheric space-music situation, where you can add your own tails to the room tails. Then nobody cares because they don't feel they are in a real room. They are in an imagined space that an Eventide Blackhole or Valhalla SuperMassive or Strymon BigSky is generating.

 

Beat Kauffman's video illustrates these ideas. Hope this helps.

 

 

 

 

[Stokely]

Someone else mentioned it, but live vs in a studio are very different things. 

 

At home I will usually to take reverb and delay off the synth patches in favor of sends/returns using a DAW reverb (Cinematic Rooms, Valhalla Delay, Tai Chi, etc).  That way you get less different reverb sounds all mingling together and the tracks can sort of share a space.   Not always though--if the patch is doing something interesting with the effect, like modulating it, it might stay.  Or the stock patch effect just might work better for whatever reason  

Depending on the song, I might have smaller rooms/chambers for some instruments, delays and maybe a really long reverb that is more felt than heard etc.   You can have fun with ducking a reverb or delay tail down when the dry instrument plays, that can help it pop out.   Some plugins have ducking built in, but you can use a compressor sidechain to do it to the return.   Another fun simple "trick" (that I've used mostly used on vocals) is to automate the sends of a long delay up at the end of a phrase--so you get this cool tail trailing off into the emptiness for that last few syllables or notes, but it doesn't get in the way before that.

Fun topic!

[ABECK]

I echo (pun intended) a lot of what others have said.  For live, the wrong amount of verb or delay can suck the impact and presence out of a sound.  I lean on the drier side live, but like to have programs setup where I can increase reverb or delay if necessary with a pre-mapped slider or knob.  I get frustrated when sooo many presets on modern boards come with buckets of wet effects applied.  I almost always strip away the non-modulation fx and start from there.  

2 hours ago, Stokely said:

Someone else mentioned it, but live vs in a studio are very different things. 

 

At home I will usually to take reverb and delay off the synth patches in favor of sends/returns using a DAW reverb (Cinematic Rooms, Valhalla Delay, Tai Chi, etc).  That way you get less different reverb sounds all mingling together and the tracks can sort of share a space. 

!00% Agree on this one.  I'd prefer to add spatial FX when everything in the mix is in context - Unless there is a program that has a real defining/signature effect that I want to capture on "tape."

Also, when recording, I add an EQ to the reverb return to cut below 200Hz and above 8-10K, as well as apply a bit of compression.  Helps reduce the mud.