How to Make Convolution Reverb More Flexible w/ Multiband and Stereo Processing

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A tutorial on a few ways to make convolution reverb more flexible with multiband processing, stereo imaging and Waves Center.

Software/Plugins:
- Avid Pro Tools
- Waves IR-L
- Waves C6
- Waves Center

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Transcript excerpt:

Hey guys. This is Eric Tarr for theproaudiofiles.com.

I wanted to put together some ideas for you about creative ways of using reverb inside of your mix. In this video, I'm going to be focusing on convolution reverb and how you can process it so that it fits well with your song.

When most people think about convolution reverb, they think about loading up a static impulse response. If that impulse response doesn't fit with your song, you load up a different impulse response. You go through this process one after the other until you find an impulse that actually fits sort of well with your track.a

What I'm going to show you how to do is how you can tailor and tweak the sound of that impulse so that it actually fits really well with your song. When you do this, you take a static impulse response, and you make it very very flexible. To begin with, let me show you some trick I like to use with reverb on drums. I'll play my drums first, without reverb.

[drums, no reverb]

So a dry, drum mix. I want to make it more exciting by adding reverb to my snare. So what I've done is taken my snare top/snare bottom microphones, and bussed them over to here to an auxiliary track I called snare verb. Then I inserted up here the Waves IR-L plug-in that can convolve an impulse response. Then I loaded up an impulse response from the stone room recording studio.

I'm just going to blend in the sound of that reverb, and actually over-emphasize it so you can really hear what's going on.

[drums with a lot of reverb]

Now let me get to actually processing the sound of this reverb. One common popular technique that people will use with reverb, is actually to use an equalizer to change the spectral shape of the reverb. So I'm going to show you just how to do that. You can do things like brighten it up or darken it by shaping the high frequencies.