How common is the addition of reverb in Mastering?

Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 10:13 am

Please! Stop! At least three qualified engineers and at least one honest to goodness mastering engineer have already chimed in. Look up. These aren't your average home studio hacks like myself. These people actually do this for a living(and do better than most of us at our day jobs). Now if we can't trust the voice of experience, we're just deluding ourselves aren't we? Reverb is best left for the mixing stage.

Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 5:51 pm

Always!

Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 9:40 pm

I have to disagree...

Surprise!

I recorded a band back in '95 in a local studio - I've continued to record this band in a few different incarnations since - and on this (the second recording I ever did with them, and the only one we ever spent a significant amount of money on)... The lead dude now owns my old studio... Where was I?

Oh, I recorded this band in '95 in a local studio.
The recording is as flat and dead as you could ever imagine.

I added verb to the songs.
I added an assload of EQ to each channel...
Each and every one of the songs....

In my opinion (and the remaining band members'...) the newer masters (which themselves are about 8 years old) with verb on the mixes sounds a thousand times better than the original DAT could ever hope to.

Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 11:02 pm

That's crazy Ben, but hey you know in the end it all just depends onthe project. Each one is different and it's up to us or an ME to decide what works and what doesn't. Be creative, because if you do the same thing on each project it'll get stale, and not fun

Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 11:08 pm

Crazy?

My soul is in that album.

My feelings and my emotions were recorded to tape along with those of the band members.

But yes, you said it and I'll paraphrase:

Have fun with it. When you take the fun out of it you suck...

<In no way meant to sound defensive... Honest!>

Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 8:18 pm

Yeah, I wouldn't assume this would be something that I would do all the time (should I ever really do a lot of mastering, right now it's just a hobby). In this particular instance it was better sounding than the dry version, to my ears anyway.

Justin

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