How to create a "room space"?

[KMuzzey]

I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the quality of the VSL -- I'm having so much fun with it!! But my weakness is with things like EQ and effects, thus my question...

I'm trying to give my mix a sense of space, and my understanding is that the best way to achieve this is to bus an effect (like "Hall") to each channel, and the instruments that would be farthest back in orchestra placement would get more reverb -- the instruments closer to the front would get less, and this should create a sense of a room. Unfortunately this hasn't worked for me... I also tried doing this, then putting a room effect on the output channel itself, but this created a realllllly muddy mix with way too much effect overall.

Can anyone offer some plain-English suggestions, or even the specifics of how you've created a realistic mix using effects?

Kerry Muzzey
kirbyko3@aol.com

[Nick Batzdorf]

Normally you'd address the reverb from an auxiliary send (or a pair of aux sends for stereo) on your mixer (either onscreen or hardware). Auxes are simply submixes that are independent of the main one; every mixer channel will have level controls that set the amount of signal sent to each aux.

Then you generally return the output of the reverb unit to an aux return (or pair).

This setup lets you control the wet/dry - meaning reverbed/unaffected - balance of each signal going to the reverb. The reason you're hearing mush with the reverb on the master bus is that it's 100% wet - there's no dry signal. That's not how it's intended to be heard.

Note that this is just the conventional set-up - there are other ways of doing it for specific cases.

[KMuzzey]

Thanks for replying. I'm bussing each instrument to a single effect at different levels of wetness, but I still can't achieve that legit-sounding room sound that I hear in so many recordings, even the VSL demos here online.

I'm wondering if I'm missing something key??

[Dietz]

Apart from the technical solutions of routing etc. (which Nick explained already): It's much about the used effect itself, of course. Just because a preset says "Orchestral Hall" it doesn't necessarily sound like one. And now the bad news: There is no "one size fits all"-solution. Lots of trial and error in the beginning, and your own experience lateron.

For our demos, I use hardly anything else than sampled rooms and halls (in form of Convolution) for reverb. Other people can't live without their Lexicon or TC. Finally, it's all about taste.

/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library

[KMuzzey]

Thanks Dietz. I guess I'll just keep plugging away... I wish PRODUCING and ENGINEERING musix was as easy as writing it...