The place for musicians to share their knowledge and ideas about music and remixing, and to post WIP snippets and feedback. Also suggest tunes for remixing, here.
I'm doing a faux-orchestra piece where I want to put about the same amount of reverb on each instrument, since they're all supposed to be in the same "concert hall."
My program (N-track) can't handle all the tracks simultaneously so I am doing premixes of various instrument groups before the final mix.
My question is -- does it make a difference *when* I apply the reverb? Will it sound different if I apply it to each instrument separately before each mixdown, or if I just wait until it's all mixed and then apply reverb to the final complete .wav file? Or will it sound the same either way?
I usually reverb each instrument separately, but that's for rock-style tracks. :) In your case I'd either reverb it all at once, or break it into sections. (left mid right, or the like). Being lazy I'd probably end up doing the whole orchestra at once.
Usually, reverbing everything at ones will cause you to loose dynimics more than gain it. I'd recommend trying to revererb each instrument by itself (or ruiner's idea), because reverbing all at ones won't let you fit the intstruments into place, or give them the right amount of reverb.
Reverbing all at ones is generally a bad idea. Even if you have all the instruments in the same hall they're not all playing from the exact same spot. By using less reverb on some intruments (making them feel "closer") and more on others you can add a "visual depth" to your soundscape. This option you won't have with reverbing all at ones.
By reverbing all at ones you'll probably make the it feel like there's one big spearker in the concert hall and everything is playing from that speaker.
It depends on the quality of the reverb, really. If you've got a great hall reverb then (a) it will take account of the stereo positioning of the instruments, and (b) it won't make the sound muddy. If you're sitting in an audience in a concert hall then the difference in reverb between the different sections is negligible (at least perceptually), and this gets truer the bigger the hall is.
What's most important is that the reverb program handles stereo properly and takes account of the different reverb for different frequencies.
With a poor reverb program, you're best applying it on a track by track basis, of course.
I think when we did BIT 3, though, we split the orchestra into sections with different reverb on each (percussion, strings, brass).
MMM,This is difficult for me to answer cos hey im not a musician!!!!
I use a hardware mixer.I send a signal from the instrument to the effects unit,and depending how much of the signal i "send" determines how much of the effect I will get back.
So i can balance the depth of an effect that way on an individual instrument.
If all your instruments are seperated in a mixer channel but you want a similar effect on all,you could set your reverb to a high volume return but only send the amount of signal you want for each instrument to the effects unit.
The resulting effect you will back for each instrument will depend on how much of its signal you sent.
