How could a Sound Engineer that works at a Sydney Recording Studio suggest such a thing! Adding reverb during mastering, that goes against all of the rules doesn’t it? Well, sometimes rules need to be broken, especially in my case.
Sydney Recording Studio: Using Reverb during mastering
You see I had a Sound Healing recorded “through the air” into a Zoom H4. I had no control over the mix in the sydney recording studio. I had to do some aggressive multiband compression, I recovered some of the ambience using the UAD Precision K Stereo but still, I knew that the Sound Healing was recorded in a cathedral but the cathedral sound wasn’t there. How else could I add a cathedral sound without using reverb and delay? I also had another huge challenge, I only wanted certain frequencies to reverb, I didn’t want the low end to reverb, just the high end.
Enter the amazing UAD Realverb Plugin. It is one of UAD’s free or entry level plugins but it was just what I needed. Combined with the UAD Cooper Time Cube Delay unit I was able to get absolutely the effect I wanted.
Both sydney recording studio real verb and time cube allow you to effectively cut out the frequency bands that you don’t want to be effected by the plugin. I was at mastering stage! I didn’t want the low end drums to reverb or delay and wash the whole thing out. I was able to get the reverb sound that I wanted and only apply it to the frequency ranges I wanted. The results were superb. It was like I had isolated the vocals into a separate track, put reverb and delay on them and inserted them back in. It was really a bit of mastering brain surgery that broke the rules but definitely gave me the effect that I wanted.
The way that I controlled the bandwidth that I wanted to reverb in the sydney recording studio was using the “Resonance” section as shown in the image above.
