Watching a video presentation by Australian gaming-composer Mick Gordon, I was inspired by a simple but powerful recording/mixing trick he mentioned that I hadn't heard of before. As described by Gordon, this method was used by the master recording and mixing engineer Tony Visconti in his work with David Bowie; it automatically imparts a non-linear, dynamic modulation to recorded live-room reverberation.
Visconti set up 3 mics for Bowie's voice:–
(1) "close", direct voice feed;
(2) about 20ft away, for "mid" live-room ambience;
(3) at the back of the room, for "far" live-room ambience.
The feeds from mics (2) and (3) were each routed through their own gate, and the set up was that whenever Bowie's singing reached intermediate loudness the "mid" gate opened up the ambience feed from "mid" mic (2), and whenever Bowie reached high loudness the "far" gate also opened up the ambience feed from "far" mic (3).
Not only does this method employ live-room ambience to enhance the musical narrative in a dynamically dramatic way, but also does so by merely exaggerating acoustic realities, rather than by adding wholly artificial adornments. This latter aspect is all too often overlooked in mixing with convolution and algorithmic reverbs, in that the reverberant response of any live room is rarely if ever perfectly linear with respect to source level; this tends to give the ear qualitative acoustical clues about how soft or strident the source sound is.
It seems to me this dynamic-reverb method is also heaven-sent for adding another valuable dimension to dynamic modulation of orchestral drama, most especially when using libraries that are well endowed with several different live-room ambience feeds, such as SySPro.
Mick Gordon's short description of Visconti's method starts at about 14:24 in this 2017 YouTube video:
