EFFECTS EDIT
Page 194
S3000XL Operator’s Manual
As we saw in the delay section, as the sound echos so it normally gets
progressively duller. The same is true of reverb. As the sound is bouncing
all over the place, each time it hits a surface, that surface will absorb some
high frequencies. If the room has a lot of furniture, curtains, drapes,
cushions, whatever, the high frequencies are absorbed even more rapidly
(which is why your living room doesn’t have a pronounced reverberant
quality). This has the effect of the reverb decay getting duller in tone as it
dies away. It is very uncommon for a room to have absolutely no damping
factor and LFDAMP and HFDAMP allow you to re-create this phenomena.
If you are trying to simulate a heavily damped environment, set LFDAMP
to 10Hz (i.e. bypass) and lower the HFDAMP parameter. If you are trying
to simulate a highly reflective environment, raise the HFDAMP parameter.
To really emphasise the high frequency content (i.e. to simulate a tiled
room), you may try raising the LFDAMP frequency.
SOME TIPS ON USING REVERB
•
Firstly, don’t overdo it! One common mistake is to smother a sound in reverb. This just
results in an indistinct, ‘mushy’ sound. A lot of reverb can be nice on slow, floating
pads and strings, the musical content of which is fairly sedate but, generally, more
reverb does not guarantee a better sound - often the reverse, in fact!.
•
Be aware that using long reverbs on fast moving sounds (i.e. fast sequences or
arpeggios) can cloud the music creating an indistinct ‘blur’ behind the music (unless
the reverb is mixed quite a way back). A nice ROOM reverb on such parts is usually
sufficient. If you can, tweak the decay time so that it doesn’t hang over into adjacent
notes too much.
•
Small rooms and the like are good on bass sounds. You may also like to try setting
the LFDAMP parameter so that only the high frequency content of the sound is
reverberated. This will keep the ‘straight’ portion of bass end free for the bass to be
heard clearly. Avoid long, boomy reverbs on bass parts as this will clutter up the
bottom end of the music.
•
To create more space between the reverb and the direct sound, set longer predelay
times. This will allow the attack of the sound to be heard without ‘smudging’ it with
reverb. For example, when applying reverb to a snare drum sound, a bit of predelay
can help separate the direct snare sound from the reverb.
•
To make a sound seem further away, send a lot of signal to the reverb and pull the
level of the direct signal back a bit in the L/R outputs. To make a sound VERY distant,
pull the direct sound out completely!
•
When putting drum kits through the reverb, watch out for the hi-hat. Fast hi-hats
through the reverb can make the overall mix very ‘splashy’ as the high frequencies get
reverberated. If you get this problem, take the high hat out of the reverb altogether
using the
function in the drums program.
With drum and percussion programs, use the
function to have more or less reverb on some drums than on others (for example,
snares can take a lot of reverb but bass (kick) drums usually have less). The
function allows you to send different drum sounds in
a program to different effects types (for example, gated on the bass drum, large hall
on the snare, medium hall on the toms, small room on selected percussion, etc.)
although in a multi-timbral setup this will use up all available effects channels.
