DEEP SPACE GETTING CREATIVE WITH REVERB
Anyone who has ever recorded a drum kit should know just how important space is to our understanding of sound. Using close, room and ambient microphones as part of multi-track sessions can give you a big-picture sound but, mute the room and ambient mics and listen to only the close sources and your kit will sound very different indeed. The same can be said of dry orchestral recordings stripped of the sound of the hall in which they were made, and many other sources for whom our understanding of how sounds should sound boils down to the space in which we expect to hear them.
What record producers want is control. Historically, however, it’s been so difficult to remove space from source recordings that many producers have erred on the side of caution and opted for the bone-dry freedom that comes with vocal booths and acoustically treated studios rather than risk it all in characterful and spacious recording spaces. With clinical, dry recordings, bespoke spatial treatments can be made at the mix stage, rather than being tied to one inadvertently captured during recording.
Ask yourself why in multi-track drum sessions the rooms and ambient mics are recorded as separate tracks rather than mixed in with the close sources.
It all comes down to spatial choice at the mix stage. Reverb, too, is crucial to this end game. As the glue that holds your mix together, reverb allows you to apply a shared sense of space to several disparate sounds at once.
Put all the members of your band on the same stage, with everybody benefiting from the shared acoustics of the surrounding environment, and your ensemble sound will be completed by the reflections of the space. However, as part of a multi-tracked studio session that makes
