Reverb Fight!

Two reverb signals can often fight for space in the mix and end up clashing, creating a swirl of echo’y muddiness. I’ve been experimenting with side chain compression on the reverb auxiliaries to hold one reverb back while another takes over.

In this case i have a snare track and a vocal track each with a send at 0dB to SpaceDesigners each with a different setting (snare at a time of 1.2s and vocals at 2s)

I noticed that when the snare is played the reverb from the vocals clashes with the snare reverb and really muddies the mix. May be i could just dial down the reverb sends however the reverb in this mix was necessary for effect.

Solution

I put a compressor on the vocal reverb auxiliary with a side chain fed from the snare. The compressor has a threshold of -50dB and a ratio of 20:1 so this is basically limiting rather than compression however it is the release time that allows the reverb signal to slowly creep back in that is important.

So every time the snare is played the side chain ducks the vocal reverb, allowing the snare reverb to cut through!

Evaluation

The mix is a lot clearer and the vocals sound crisp over the snare