If You Like Your Reverb: eq before reverb

Your reverb has a job to do. Actually it has several. One of them is, well, to reverberate.

That means thousands of tiny little echoes smearing the audio energy across time. But what I’m here to talk to you about is this. Those echoes also have another job, and that is to take on the characteristics of the space and the materials that reflect them.

The brightness of a plate, the warmth of wood. Every reverb adds its own EQ fingerprint, and if you like the sound of your reverb, I challenge you to think before you follow it with an EQ in your signal chain. Your reverb is adding frequencies to your signal, and rather than remove it from its output, consider limiting it from getting that signal in the first place.

A lot of engineers favor rolling off the high end or even de-essing a vocal before it goes into the reverb. Similarly, you can cut some of the lows, and while the difference may be subtle, what you’re doing is letting the reverb bloom naturally, adding back some of what you’ve taken out and keeping the characteristics of the space it’s designed to replicate. If you like the sound of your reverb, don’t change it.

Instead, consider changing what it hears and let it do its thing. I’ll also add that this is another reason that I advocate placing effects like this in parallel rather than putting them directly on the track with an insert. That allows you to keep the two components separate and process them independently of each other.

Remember, there are no rules, but that doesn’t mean you can’t produce more thoughtfully. Show that with someone who belongs at V-Kitchen.