Adding reverb without muddying up the mix

[luckyblue]

I just finished up this song that I started years ago. I did a quick recording with my daughter and now I want to finish up by adding other instruments. Every time I add reverb it seems messy. I want to get a little of that echo sound without too much of the tone of the reverb. I've tried using the pre-delay, and I've even tried using a delay plugin before the reverb. Any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[BrianBaughn]

Is there already reverb on the recording? Reverb on top of reverb is always a mess.

Reverb settings, such as the ones shown below in PlatinumVerb (in Logic Pro X) need a lot of tweaking to get to what you may have in your head. Also, to get what you're looking for there may need to be individual reverbs per track.

Do you have this in a multitrack format?

 

[1050792]

Route the intrument that you want to add the reverb to a different bus and add the reverb on that bus. Put a channel strip eq and do a High cut at around 450Hz and a Low cut at 1700kHz. You can use the volume output of the reverb bus that you just created to shape the sound of the reverb. This gives you more control over the effects, also works with chorus, delay.

 

[F1Mac]

Might be a simple case of finding the right balance between dry and wet signal... @OP are you using Logic Pro X?

 

[Cayden]

Route the intrument that you want to add the reverb to a different bus and add the reverb on that bus. Put a channel strip eq and do a High cut at around 450Hz and a Low cut at 1700kHz. You can use the volume output of the reverb bus that you just created to shape the sound of the reverb. This gives you more control over the effects, also works with chorus, delay.

I absolutely agree with this method. Have a separate reverb track that your vocal tracks are routed to. Adding reverb to the really high and low end really ends up sounding bad imo. You don't need any dry volume, just adjust the wet volume (and pre-delay) and the track volume and it would be great. I personally like to make a bus that I route all my vocals to and a separate one for guitars as this can give you more control

 

[beyond]

If the recording isn't very good to begin with, there´s not much you can do.