Worship Musician January 2020 | Page 145

even ‘Taj Mahal’ (it took me years to finally get that joke.) As you might have guessed, these settings offer spacial models of reverb via a range of combinations of Pre-delay and Decay Time (and other parameters we’ll dive into later) that approximate what a source would sound like in each of those physical acoustic spaces. My goal in this article is to help get you familiar with how these combinations come together so that you can better adjust and refine your own reverb approach for your mix. DRUM ROLL, PLEASE … One easy and effective way to get a better handle on how these two controls play together is to create virtual soundcheck tracks to play with in your sanctuary on your regular FOH console during off hours. Load up a loop of a soloed snare drum backbeat, apply reverb to that track and study the interplay between Pre-delay and Delay Time without touching any other settings. Maybe aim for a quick and obvious reverb that gets out of the way almost like a gated reverb. Then try to create more of an 80’s long trailing tail that would be at home on a power ballad. With only those two controls, you should be able to get quite a wide range of usable settings. Live vocals are particularly well suited for a bit of tasteful reverb. Once you’ve got a feel for the solo snare track reverbs, bring up a track with the full worship band and vocals. Repeat the same snare drum exercise on the lead vocal track, noting how the Pre-delay can impact intelligibility of the vocals on more rhythm vocal segments. It will also be interesting to listen to how your previous unaccompanied snare reverb settings play in the full mix. If you don’t have ready access to the space for testing and playing with reverb, you can somewhat approximate the exercise with a DAW and headphones to get a basic feel for each control. These key reverb parameters are also important in the recording and broadcast audio world, but the interplay of added reverb with the particular acoustics of your church are important to get familiar with as soon as you While most guitar amps offer a single control for reverb levels, modern digital reverb units can be much more complex. January 2020 Subscribe for Free... 145