Adding a reverb

This is the part of mixing that sounds very simple, but for some reason has been the hardest part to find my way in. I’m sharing a few things that I’ve tried, but really – like everything else – it’s down to what you like yourself.

Normally when you speak, you always hear some sort of echo. There’s too much stuff around us that will bounce back the sound of your voice to prevent this from happening. So even though you’ve used EQ and compression, and you’ve even panned and balanced the tracks, your voice will still sound a little strange. This is because it’s missing some reverb or echo. This final step will really be the finishing touch.

You have various ways to add a reverb to your vocals. By default Logic already offers you some default settings you can alter. Before you begin it might help you to know – as it did me with my first couple of mixing attempts – that others usually add a plate reverb to pop vocals. Logic only has one menu with those, so that really cuts down the options for you.

My first more successful attempt at adding a reverb was to use SpaceDesigner. To add this go to the track and add a plugin > Reverb > Space Designer. It looks like this:

This is what the Space Designer looks like.

This is what the Space Designer looks like.

In the drop down menu, at the top of the previous screen, you can find the default setting. Go to Medium spaces > Plate reverbs to see all the plate reverbs.

The menu that has all plate reverb options

The menu that has all plate reverb options

Once you’ve selected one, you can change the settings in the space designer. The best thing to do is to select a little bit of the vocal and play it back every time you change something. Keep trying until you feel you got it right. Always make sure to also check it with the music and other vocals as well if you are changing the settings on acappella mode.

For me the above method seemed to work fine on one of my dance tracks, but unfortunately it didn’t work for the track I worked on after. The default setting seems to add too much echo for me and I was looking for a way to control it more. So mostly since, I add a bus line and add the space designer on the aux track that it’s created. I, by default, always start using the 1.7s Blue Plate reverb. Then use the controls of the bus to get it just the way I think is ok.

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