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My pleasure, @DrewB!
1) Do you pan the reverb send towards the pan of the instrument? For example ‘Follow Main Pan’ in Pro Tools or something like that?
- That’s a great option and solid starting point! That said, I don’t follow that as a rule. In fact, sometimes I LOVE panning the direct signal on one side of the stereo spectrum and the reverb on the other side (great trick for delays too). Or whatever panning floats your creative boat! If your goal is realism though, then yeah, ‘follow main pan’ is a great choice.
2) Do you generally send the same levels of the instruments to the room reverb?
- No way, man! I mean, you certainly could do that … and it might end up sounding perfect. But … don’t miss out on additional creative options by applying a unique amount of verb to each instrument, giving the listener a sense of depth. For example, maybe the lead singer has very little room verb (send level very low), and the tambourine that enters in the chorus is tucked into the mix at a low volume but with lots of room verb (send level very high) to give the illusion that it’s farther away. You could magnify that effect even more by setting the tambo’s verb send to ‘pre-fader,’ which will allow you to tuck the direct tamb signal way down low (via the main mixer fader) yet still have plenty of signal sent to the verb (via the send fader). This is because, when sends are set to ‘pre-fader’ (aka ‘pre-fade’) they have full access to the dry signal before (aka ‘pre’) that dry signal gets turned down – or up – by the mixer fader.
Happy verb-ing!
Dana