Vocals masterclass with Ashley Thorpe
Vocal reverb guide
Do your vocals sound washed out after reverb? Here are some tips for using reverb to add power to vox, rather than take it away
#02
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Reverb – it’s an essential tool most people will be familiar with. It can add space, power, even emotion to vocals. You’d be hard pressed to find a modern pop song without it. Usually when new music makers come to adding reverb, there’s a sound that they imagine in their head. But then… there’s a completely different result that they get.
A common mistake made by my new students, and even clients who send me a rough mix or their DAW sessions to mix and master, is to go crazy with plugins on every single channel. If there’s a main vocal track and say two or three vocal backing tracks plus adlibs, there might be a reverb plugin on every single one of them!
Not only is this taking up valuable RAM and slowing down your session, it’s also counterproductive in getting the desired sound. The different reverbs with different settings on each of the vocal tracks mean that the vocals are sitting in entirely different acoustic spaces and won’t sound cohesive.