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SilverVerb - Part 1

Hi. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use silver verb when mixing in logic pro 10. So what I'm gonna do first is set up silver verb on a bus. So I've got this bus here where I'm using the tape delay. I'm gonna replace that with silver verb now. So I just click here. That's a rever and silver up. OK? So what you see here are some of the most basic and most fundamental features of a reverb plug in and these will help you to understand how reverb works and how it affects the staging of an element in a mix. First of all, I'm actually gonna turn off modulation and I'm gonna increase the wet signal because I've got this on the bus just because I wanna focus on these elements here. The first one and one of the most critical settings in a river plug in is the prede the pre delay determines not the sort of space that the sound sounds like it's in. But where in that space, if you pitch yourself in the middle of a massive hole and there's a person right at the other end of the hall and the...

y shout to you. What you hear is them shouting to you directly. But you also hear the first reflections. And the first reflections are when their voice collides with the nearest surface and bounce straight to you. When it's just one bounce between you and the source of the sound. That is a first reflection or an early reflection. The time between the dry signal and what you hear from the first reflections is the pre delay. However, if that person was closer to you, not only would their voice be louder in comparison to the first reflections, but it would also be sooner than the first reflections that would suggest a longer pre delay time. So if they're right close to you and they talk to you, the difference between the sound source reaching your ears and the first reflection points is going to be longer. So a longer pre delay means the sound is more upfront in the mix, but a shorter pre delay means the sound is more distant from the mix. Another good rule of thumb when using a pre delay is to use one that sounds too long. So when you're mixing and you're trying to find that right pre delay setting, find the one that just sounds too long, sounds too detached from the material and then just bring it back in ever so slightly. But like I said, the pre delay effectively determines where in the stage the sound is coming from our brains, use that information to localize sound in the space. So if I want the vocal upfront in the mix, I'm gonna want a relatively long pre delay. But if I want it pushed back in the mix, I want a shorter pre delay, relatively speaking. So let's actually experiment with that now. So I've got this vocal track. I've sent quite a lot of gain to this bus here. I had to send, let's have a listen. Wind rushes past my face and through my hair for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, rushes past my face and through my hair. OK. So you could hear as I toggled the mute on this bus that there's quite a distinct difference between no reverb and some reverb and it sounded all right. It sounded quite good. What I'm gonna do now though is solo. The reverb just so we know what it sounds like. And also I think I want a bit more gain in this reverb channel because I wanna be able to pull the fader down a bit more. Um When I'm mixing the reverb. So I'm just gonna load again here. Go to utility gain. I'm just gonna increase that by 10 DB so that when I'm mixing, I've got more fader to work with. I could have also just increased the gain on the send there, but I might want to adjust that as well. So there's no one way to do these things. But that's just kind of how I work rushes past my face and through my head for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. OK. So now let's experiment with a shorter pre delay, rushes past my face and through my head for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, rushes past my face and through my head. So the shorter pre delay creates this fairly muddied effect. So I'm gonna increase the pre delay here so that the vocal is still sitting at the front of the sound stage, rushes past my face and through my head. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying rushes past my face and through my head for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. Ok, pretty happy with that pre delay setting. And I was also managing the volume of the Rivera bus from there now moving on to reflectivity. So the reflectivity determines how reflective the surfaces are. So imagine a space where all of the walls and the floor and the ceiling are made of marble that's gonna be really reflective, meaning that the reflections are just gonna stick around longer cos they're just gonna be bouncing off the walls, more bouncing off each other because the surfaces just aren't absorbing so much of the sound. But if the space was full of curtains and soft materials, it'd be less reflective cos it'd be absorbing those reflections. Let's experiment with that rushes past my face and through my head for the briefest of as you can hear, a higher reflectivity percentage means that the reflections just stick around longer because they're just bouncing off the walls. Gonna dial that down a bit cos that's quite long. Great. It's a good idea before you start using reverb to kind of have an idea, a rough idea in your mind about the sort of space that you want that vocal sound or any other track that you are mixing to be in. And then you can use the theory of reverb to start navigating towards that goal and then refining by ear from there. The next parameter I'd like to show you is the size. So the size simply determines the size of the space that the reverb is simulating. So higher values mean a larger space and lower values mean a smaller space. Yes. Just a moment. I feel like I'm flying, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair using small reverb sizes like this can be really useful to add body to a vocal sound. So if you've got a vocal track and it was recorded in a very dead space and it sounds quite scratchy and it's kind of detached from the mix, you can use a sound like this and sometimes with short pre delays, not so much to give it a sense of space, but just give it a sense of three dimension. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the brief is the moments I feel like. So you notice there when I bypassed the rever, it just sounds like a recorded track, but when I put it back on, it actually sounds like a sound in a space. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. Great. Now, let's have a look at the density of the reflection. So that basically determines how many reflections there are the co sort of complexity of the reverb. Let's start by dialing it down all of the way it should sound more like an echo, more like a sort of ping pong effect. That's pretty, that's 10%. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair. For the brief is the moments I feel like I'm flying, the wind rushes past my face and through my eye, you can hear how you can more clearly discern between the reflections sometimes that's quite appropriate. But if you want more complex reverb more diffuse, then you go for a higher percentage here. OK. Has my face my OK. Mhm. Right. Yeah. More for the briefest moments, I feel like I'm flying, see how it starts to sound more like a delay when I bring that density value down. So it's basically just the complexity of the reef of the amount of reflections and how diffuse it is. What I'm gonna do now for this vocal actually is come back to a sort of setting where it's not in such a big space, but I'm using it more to add body to the vocal, which is just one of many applications for using a reverb. The wind rushes past my face and through my hair. As long as I feel like I'm flying rushes past my face, my hair for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair, the ones I feel like I'm fine, the wind rushes past my face and through my hair. OK. So I've roughly landed at a setting which I'm happy with in terms of adding body to a vocal sound. What I'm gonna do now is experiment with the low cut and the high cut features. So this is just a built in filter, very useful for just e Qing your reverb sound, which is very useful in mixing. Because if for example, the reverb has just too much bottom end, it might feel really muddy in the mix. So sometimes it's good to isolate the frequency band in which you hear the reverb, especially when you don't want it to sort of interrupt or clash with a lot of other content in that frequency spectrum when you're mixing. So from here, I'm just gonna uns solo the River bus. I'm gonna bring the fader down first actually and then just mix it back in, rushes past my face and through my hair. So right now the vocal sound is very raw, very scratchy, very sort of in your face. I'm not really in the mix at this point, not really embedded in the mix. And what I'm gonna do actually is first turn it down because it does seem a bit loud, rushes past my face and through and now we're gonna mix in a reverb, rushes past my face and through my for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying just passed my face and through my for the briefest of most. Ok. So I've blended a bit of that reverb in and now what I'm gonna do is toggle the mute button on the reverb bus just so that you can clearly hear the difference between having that bodied sort of reverb sound against just having a sort of scratchy vocal track rushes past my face and through my, for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying just past my face and through my, for the briefest of moments, I feel like I'm flying. She's passed my face and through my OK. And from now I just refined the filter inside the reverb just so that it was channeling those reflections into a certain part of the frequency spectrum that I felt was kind of more available in the mix. And what I might do is I'll probably leave that there as its own bus. And I'm gonna call this Fox body verb because it's not going to be the only reverb that I use. I'm gonna use another reverb to sit the vocal in the sound stage, but I'm gonna leave that one there on its own bus so that I can bring that in to add body when I'm further in the mixing process later on. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.