Reverb

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about reverb. Much of my music has two effects, delay and reverb. I often find flange and even chorus a bit to heavy for my tastes. Even with delay and reverb I tend to back the mix down. I see it more like a soft filter on a photograph. Enhancing but not so much so that it draws attention from the picture.

For a long while now I have been using Guitar Rig's Reflector for reverb. It's a decent impulse response modeler and I can just drag it into a rack. I also use Spirit Canyon Audio's impulse responses because I am always looking for more exotic sounds.

Ok, that's the background. Now I come to the dilemma. When I use these they are either to little or to much. I have Waves IR-1 but it's a CPU crusher. Perhaps it would work better. When I get to much reverb, it becomes it's own sound. It sounds disconnected from the sound I am applying it to.

Now this appears to me to be a problem with impulse response. Your kind of stuck with the space. You can back the level down but what I want is more like backing diffusion down.

Here is where I see an advantage to algorithmic reverbs. You get control over parameters like diffusion and, on the EQ side high and sometimes low frequency damping with crossover frequencies. Also other parameters that control the acoustic space they emulate.

So my hope is that by doing some tweaking and using algorithmic reverb I can get closer to wear I want to be. I can also mix in the exotic reverb but I am thinking of doing that with post production automation if the mix so that it can fill some quiet passages with more exotic tails. I think EQ and compression are also useful tools here.

So I am just throwing this out there in the hopes I get some comments. Do you use reverb? Which reverb do you use? What techniques do you use? Why?

Hope to hear from some readers. I really would love the feedback.