Reverb is probably one of the most versatile of all audio effects used to process sound. You can always come up with new and exciting ways to use it. In recent years, reverb like all other audio processing effects, has advanced in terms of sound sculpting. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to process drums with the spectral reverb effect.
As usual, we prepared a short sequence in SoundBridge. It includes most of the major elements of a full mix. Let us take listen to it.
The snare drum, as you may have noticed in the audio example above, is unprocessed, and sounds rather dry and out of place in the overall mix. We’ll fix this by applying an instance of Spacelab Ignition reverb effect, which we’ll discuss further below.
How to Use Spectral Reverb
One could describe spacelab as a new school 3D audio panning, reverb, and spatial tool. It gives audio the proper acoustic perspective, which is critical for films, games, VR/AR, and any other applications where immersive audio is required. In addition, Spacelab allows users to freely place and move tracks in the DAW as if they were objects in a virtual space. It is complete with realistic reverb and simulation of the listener’s position. Here, we’ll just focus on its reverb engine, go over the essentials, and see what makes this effect so unique.
After the opening of the Spacelab Ignition interface, we can see 2 main sections. The top one comprises 5 sections and offers controls for room character, modulate, tail, EQ and mixing.
The room section is used to adjust the width, height, and length of the virtual room. The 4 knobs in this section change the density of the reverb tail. Next, we have the big knob in the tails section which adjusts the decay for all 9 frequency bands together, and what makes this effect different is that you can adjust each of these bands individually. By doing this, we can get some really awesome results! Further, there’s an EQ section where it’s possible to shape the reverb tail with 9 sliders. Finally, we can see the last section which contains the pre-delay, wet gain, and dry/wet mix controls.
After setting the parameters, let us hear how our snare drum sounds before and after processing with the Spacelab Ignition.
Conclusion
For the end, let us hear how our processed snare drum sounds in the context of the full mix.
If you liked this article on reverb processing, here are some more on the same subject:
