Once upon a time in recording history, artificial reverb was difficult and expensive to achieve. Now with modern processors and plug-ins, high quality reverb is available to everyone. But does this necessarily make your recordings better?

Question number 1 is why use reverb at all?

The reason reverb is virtually a necessity is because of the current practice of close miking. Oddly enough, close miking has not always been the norm. It took innovative producer Joe Meek to discover that putting the microphones much closer than the then accepted distance gave a much more exciting sound. But close miking deprives the sound of its natural reverberation, so the artificial variety is used to compensate.

At this point it is easy to see why we use reverb. But there is more to it than that - reverb just sounds nice. There is some instinct inside us to prefer a luxuriant aural environment, just as we prefer a luxuriantly soft sofa to a hard bench.

But reverb can have the characteristics of a drug in this respect. Try it, like it, use it... want more.

Of course there is no harm done. If you like the sound you are getting, then use as much reverb as you feel that you need. But there is another risk... it is very easy to use reverb to conceal mistakes, or to try and turn a basically bad recording into something superficially acceptable.

Just ask yourself the question - when was the last time I added reverb because the sound just didn't seem good enough? The answer for many people could be, "All the time". And this is not the route to a good recording. If you find yourself using reverb to cover up faults or improve a basically bad sound, it is a sign that your recording skills are not yet up to scratch.

What I recommend is a period of ‘cold turkey’. Switch off your reverb processor or de-install your reverb plug-in for a month. Yes four solid weeks of recording and mixing without reverb.

I guarantee that this will sharpen up your recording and mixing skills because you will be forced to make sure that each sound is optimized and as good intrinsically as it possibly can be. And when you are mixing, you won’t have reverb to ‘smooth things over’ – you’ll have to blend the sounds carefully yourself.

Then when you return to using your reverb after this period, you will be amazed at how much less you need to use it – you’ll just use it when you want to, and your recordings will be so much better.

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mo konten reverb mwa li donne sa son 80s rock la

Hey j'ai clické, ça marche pas
Sérieusement, intéressant article, personnellement j'y apprend rien mais je suis sûr que ça en intéressera d'autres. C'est sûr qu'entre "Blood sugar sex magic" de RHCP (one of the dryest albums ever, no artificial reverb used) et les albums de Sigur Ros, il y a un monde… Pour info, le tout dernier remixage de l'album de Feedback (au moins le vingtième, en fait je ne compte plus le nombre de fois que je l'ai remixé) a consisté pour moi à diminuer toutes les reverbs.

La reverb reste essentielle non comme effet, mais pour simuler un environnement acoustique de type "room", pour les enregistrements home made, faits dans une chambre donc, où normalement on ne dispose pas de bonne reverb naturelle. Une bonne pratique, dans de tels cas, est d'utiliser une reverb courte sur tous les instruments pour donner l'impression qu'ils sont tous dans la même pièce, afin que l'enregistrement sonne naturel. Attention au dosage : on ne doit pas vraiment entendre cette reverb, mais plutôt remarquer son absence lorsqu'on l'enlève !

Il est possible de remplacer la reverb par des délais subtils. C'est ce que fait Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), par exemple, il n'utilise quasiment jamais de reverb.

Ah maintenant je comprends pourquoi je trouvais que cet album était tres mal enregistré et que ça sonnait synthetique.

This confuses me.
I'm currently experimenting with some IRs to grasp some smoother reverbs in order to get my "good" sound (to my ears) sound "good enough". I can't figure out how anything i did til now could sound ok without reverb. So my question is, what are reference records that I can listen where reverb is not overly used and which sound good?

Any album by Enya

No, seriously, Red Hot Chili Peppers "Blood sugar sex magik". No artificial reverb used.