On 12/8/06, padawan12 padawan12@obiwannabe.co.uk wrote:
Personally I'd drop the freeverb. Lot's of people seem to put a reverb on their synths then get to see it's really best without it. Reverb is nearly always global effect in most cases, unless you're Phil Collins and want your drumkit to sound like each drum is in a different room. If the synth is washed in reverb too much I think you lose the focus of the sound, the sound becomes all about the reverb and not about the synth, so you lose control because you cant really hear it anymore as you twiddle the controls.
I agree about dropping the freeverb from the patch, as it's really better to let people choose their own (or no) effects unless it's truly integral to the synth's sound.
However, I disagree about reverb being a global effect unless you are Phil Collins. I think this depends on the genre.
I make quite a bit of techno/house/electro/minimal, and to me reverb is almost never a global effect. I usually use it (or a synced delay) on one or two sounds in a mix which need to have a sort of floating/wash feel and lay over the top. But the key to getting nice and tight percussion, and very clean mixes that will sound right in a a big room, is having most of your stuff totally dry with no effects at all, except compression of some sort ... I might have 8 fx tracks, and just one will have reverb, and a second delay. This assumes one is making tracks that may be played on a club system at some point. Headphone/listening music would give one more leeway. But this technique been working for me as my stuff is sounding quite good on those systems -- comparable to other stuff I've been playing out with my own stuff side by side.
Note, I'm not saying put different reverb on each thing - but rather use a single reverb, but only on one or two elements in a mix.
This being the case, you still wouldn't want the reverb built into the synth, as it needs to be applied in terms of the mix as a whole. Just my personal opinion.
~David