Quick Tip: How to Create a Natural Reverberation Sound by Bussing Correctly

Quick Tip: How to Create a Natural Reverberation Sound by Bussing Correctly

on Sep 14th 2012 with 15 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Time: 10 minutes
  • Requirements: Logic Pro or other DAW
This entry is part 7 of 13 in the Masterful Reverb: Everything You Need to Know Session
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Compression can suck the dynamics out of your track’s reverb. In this tutorial we learn how to use correct bussing so that your reverb still sounds natural even though your track is heavily compressed.

Karl Skivington is KE-SOUNDFORMEDIA on Audiojungle
 
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Karl Skivington is a teacher of music based in Nottingham, UK. He is an Associate of the London College of Music and a graduate from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. He holds professional associate diploma in teaching guitar and a 1st class degree in music education.  

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  • Tom Richard

    Hi Karl Skivington
    Whats the difference between adjusting the volume on the aux channel of the reverb and adjusting the send of the vocal track?

  • LaurentB

    Thanks for that tutorial.

    I like the sound of the compressed reverb .

    But I don’t know how to do,that in reaper and FL Studio.

    Logic’s routing seems difficult to understand for me.

    Can you tell me please where do I put the compressor intain other daws to obtain that result?

    Many thanks by advanced

    LaurentB , Music Teacher, FRANCE

    • Adam Avramov

      In Reaper, you should create a track with the reverb on it and create sends to it. This is quite similar to Logic, only Logic automatically creates the busses for you, I think.

      FL Studio’s mixed had separate send busses, as far as I remember; you should put the reverb there.

      • Adam Avramov

        Looking through the tutorial again, I’m not sure you could do the I/O thing in FL (although I haven’t used FL for a long, long time so I might be wrong), so you might have to actually duplicate the track instead – a bit less convenient since you’ve now got two separate tracks to manage, but

        In Reaper, I’d create two sends, then turn off the track’s Master/Parent Send (which is in the Routing window, which in turn is shown by clicking the track’s IO button).

  • ff

    Why not simply use a pre-fader send for the track and keep the compressor on that channel?

    • http://www.soulsanctuarymusic.com Soul Sanctuary

      Exactly what I was thinking. Was a bit hard to follow what he was doing to at times to and I knew what he was meant to be doing, not sure this would be much good to someone if they didn’t know their DAW very well :/

      • JJ

        In Logic, at least, the pre-fader sends are post-insert, so you’d still be applying reverb to the compressed signal.

  • jc

    Yeah, would a prefader send to your strip with the compressor be the same thing? Also can the original channel strip maintain all your EQ and other things you might do to vocals, as in, is it just the compression you want to bus out? And lastly, as an amateur, I thought for effects such as reverb its good to have your plugins wet signal on max and then control how much of the effect from the send on your track you want the effect on. It looks like this was left about half way, send turned to 100%, and the main fader of the reverb channel was used to control its volume. Is that route essentially the same thing?

  • Karl Skivington
    Author

    Hi All,

    TOM: No difference. I just prefer to control the volume from the aux channel fader for the reason that it is clearer to see.

    LAUREN: I don’t know my way around any other DAW apart from Logic, so I’m afraid I cant help you on this one.

    JC: Question 1- Bus 2 is post send, like Bus 1, so yes; I could have set up the send the same way as Bus 1 (I realise this now). However, it was important that Out1-2 was removed, as I didn’t want the original track to be heard.

    Think of Post (Blue) and Pre (Green) like this:
    Post (Blue): In a relationship – For example, pull down the volume on the original channel strip; your Aux volume goes down as well.
    Pre (Green): Not in a relationship – The changing of volume on the original strip makes no difference to the Aux volume.

    Answering your question, I prefer in this case to use post send to the reverb and compressor so I can control the volume of both at the same time. You could use pre for the compressor, but it may start getting confusing having post and pre on the same strip.

    Question 2 -The original channel strip will maintain all your EQ and other things you might do, post or pre-send.

    Question 3 – When ever possible, I put the bussed reverb to 100% wet on the plug in, and control the dry from my original track, the wet from the bussed track with my pre-send set at 100% (or 0.0) at all times.

    However, in this case I couldn’t achieve that. Why? Because I disabled my output (out of choice, as explained in question 1), so I had no way of controlling my wet and dry mix from the faders. I used the plug-in to control wet/dry mix.

    Hope this helps folks,
    Thank you for your interest,
    Karl Skivington

    • Tom Richard

      Thanks for the answer

  • LaurentB

    THANKS YOU FOR ALL GUYS THAT ANSWERED TO ME…. but it’s not easy to understand !

  • jc

    Yes, thanks so much for helping out with the answers!

  • Terrence

    can’t you just right click the bus and select prefader? that way you can compress the hell out of the track but the send is before all of the compression? instead of creating extra busses (if you have a lot to group and like to experiment with multiple reverbs and delays you might end up with quite a few busses in which case keeping them minimal in amount would be ideal?) I noticed you are just using logic I suppose other Daw’s don’t have that feature….

    • CeZ

      Signal is processed top to bottom. As far as I know pre fade send is pre fade, not pre-inserts, so it would be picking up the sound already compressed from the insert. Pretty much standard across DAWs. Bussing is the option, as I have seen in the webcast.

      And yes you would need several busses to apply several reverbs, delays and compression styles. My mixes usually end up with one to 2 dozens busses. Number of busses are limited by the DAW and the processing power of the workstation.

      Another option is duplicating the entire track and apply wet effect to the duped track. And this *would* be less efficient, for several reasons.

      • Terrence

        wow. I think i’ll crawl into a hole now for not understanding such a simple concept for all of these years. I must have read something along the way that i didn’t fully understand and then never followed up with it. Thanks for the clarification.