5 creative reverb techniques
to try in your productions

If you’re producing music, one of the most important tools you’ll come across is reverb. It’s a ubiquitous audio effect that fundamentally informs how we perceive sound. Reverb adds a kind of three-dimensional depth to sound and makes things seem as if they’re in a space. Small ambiences and sprawling cavernous reverbs alike, reverb is one of the audio effects that can take your music from sounding amateur to something distinctly ‘more.’

In this article, we’ll explore five creative reverb techniques to elevate your productions and mixes, from nuanced ambiance to transition automation.

Jump to these sections:

• What is reverb?
• Creative ways to use reverb in music production
  1. Add space and depth with subtle reverb
  2. Use gated reverb on your snares for character and punch
  3. Enhance keys and guitars with width and modulation
  4. Automate reverb parameters for transitions and movement
  5. Sculpt dynamic reverb tails with Massive X’s built-in reverb

Follow along with this tutorial using the 360 Essentials subscription, an always up-to-date production toolkit with everything you need to write, produce, and mix your music.

What is reverb?

Reverb is an audio effect that allows us to emulate the way sound behaves in physical space. When a sound is produced, it reflects off surfaces in the environment and creates a tail of decaying echoes that gives a sense of size, shape, and distance.

You can hear reverb — real reverb — in whichever room you’re in right now. Take a second to make a sound like clapping or shouting. The reflections you hear after the sound source you’ve created are part of the room’s natural reverb. Do it again and try to listen to the character of the reverb in your room:

Is it bright sounding (full of high frequencies), or dark (lacking in high frequencies)?

Does it fade away very quickly, or does it take a long time?

Did the reverb occur immediately after you made the sound, or did it take some time to start reflecting?

In music production, reverb is typically added using plugins, and the above questions are important in understanding what these plugins can do. Tools like Raum allow for detailed control over decay time, pre-delay, diffusion, and more. They can enable you to add anything from a tight room ambiance to a vast, ethereal space.

Creative ways to use reverb in music production

Many producers ask: how can I use reverb creatively beyond just making a sound ‘wet’? The answer lies in how you time, shape, and automate your reverb, and how you pair it with other effects or modulations.

Let’s break down five reverb techniques, all of which can be employed by NI reverbs included in the 360 Essentials package.

1. Add space and depth with subtle reverb

To make a sound feel more natural, you can apply a transparent layer of reverb that simulates room ambiance.

Let’s take this dry piano chord progression and make it sound more natural with an instance of Raum.

Before being subtle with our use of reverb, we should listen to exactly how it can affect our sound source. This is what you hear if you turn the mix knob to 100% (that leaves only the reverb sound, and not the original sound source).

Now that we know what the reverb is actually doing, we can pull it back to around 30% mix level for a subtle ambient sound.

We’re left with something that sounds far more natural than our original dry recording, without the reverb taking up too much space in the mix. Mixing with reverb can tuck the piano comfortably into the production without overwhelming its detail or character.

2. Use gated reverb on your snares for character and punch

Gated reverb can add explosive impact to drums, especially snares, without cluttering the mix. It became famous in the ’80s through recordings like “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. Listen to the snare after the iconic drum break at 3:16 to hear the gated snare sound.

Here’s how to do it yourself. First, you’re going to need your snare to sit on its own audio track, or have a way of routing it to a return track. Create a return or aux track with Raum on it.

For this particular reverb sound, we’re going to use the ‘Big Room’ preset, with the mix knob set to 100% (setting up reverbs like this is generally good practice, as you can finely control the mix balance between the source sound and the effect return).

Now, set your send level from the snare track to the reverb return to full.

Now, to get that ‘80s style gated sound, we need to add a gate to the reverb channel. A gate cuts off a sound source once it falls below a certain level, which is what creates the quick ‘loss’ of the reverb in this technique.

Here’s what our drum loop sounds like without the gated snare:

And now with the gated snare:

This gives the snare a thick, processed tail that cuts off cleanly. It works especially well in slower tempos or dramatic transitions.

3. Enhance keys and guitars with width and modulation

Reverb can help instruments like electric pianos, acoustic guitars, or synth leads sit more broadly in a mix by creating stereo width and motion.

One approach is to send your instrument to a reverb bus using Raum or Flair. After applying the reverb, insert an instance of Phasis in the effects chain to gently modulate the reverb tail. This modulation adds movement and shimmer, and gives us extra stereo width without making the source sound overly synthetic.

Let’s compare a dry keyboard sound to one that has been processed with modulated reverb.

4. Automate reverb parameters for transitions and movement

Creative reverb tricks can also be used to shape transitions and highlight key musical moments like the build-up to a drop in an electronic track.

One effective technique is to automate the reverb mix level leading into a new section. This allows the sound to gradually become more spacious and intense.

Another option is to extend the decay time of a reverb at the end of a phrase, letting it trail off and blend into the next section. Adjusting the pre-delay during a build-up can also create a perceived shift in distance and make you feel like you’re getting further from the sound.

Let’s listen to this loop we’ve created, paying attention to how the addition of automated reverb over time creates the feeling of suspense, as if a drop is about to happen. We’ve also automated a high-pass filter that increases its cutoff over time to prevent things from becoming muddy:

5. Sculpt dynamic reverb tails with Massive X’s built-in reverb

Combining reverb with modulation and synthesis is where things can get experimental and creative.

You can try combining modulation and synthesis with dynamic reverb shaping in Massive X, where you can route LFOs or ADSR contours to reverb parameters.

For instance, let’s see what happens when we map envelopes and LFOs to the mix, send, and color knobs in Massive X’s reverb insert.

We can hear how the different inputs at different levels affect our reverb sound.

The possibilities here are endless as the synth is extremely flexible. If you can think of a crazy way to modulate your reverb, Massive X will let you do it.

Try out these creative reverb techniques with NI reverbs

You can try all the reverb techniques above using the 360 Essentials subscription – including Raum, Phasis, and Massive X. Together, these give you a broad palette for subtle mixing improvements and full-on creative composition.

Load up Raum, apply a few of these techniques to your latest track, and see where it leads. Sometimes, a single reverb tail is all it takes to make a moment impactful.

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