Reverb is a great way to add depth to any number of tracks in your session.  Here is a quick mixing tutorial about a trick that has been used on countless recordings. It involves panning your reverb to give the track a more open, wider, and bigger sound. This trick usually works best on accompaniment tracks such as guitars or background vocals.

For the sake of this demo, I’ll consider a guitar track. Let’s assume that our guitar is panned a little off center (i.e 50%) so it will not be competing any of the typical “center panned” tracks, such as the snare and vocal. What you need to do at this point is create an AUX track and bus your guitar to it.  AUX tracks in Pro Tools, Logic, etc, allow you to monitor the output of effects plug-ins, as well as create internal submixes and stems. In our case, we want to monitor the output of a mono reverb, so make sure you are using a mono AUX track.  Pick a reverb you like–ProTool’s DVerb, Logic’s Space Designer, Waves RVerb–anything will do. insert it onto your AUX track, and pan this track 50% in the opposite direction of the fictitious guitar track (so if the guitar is panned to the right, then pan the AUX track to the left.)  Now, use an available send to bus your guitar over to the Aux.

It’s that simple! Again, this will help when mixing all sorts of instruments, so feel free to try it on anything. This mixing tip also works very well with mono delays to make a track sound “bigger” in the mix, without muddying things up. This tutorial will work in ProTools, Cubase, or any other DAW you run across.

Check back soon for more info, Pro Tools tutorials, Ableton Live tips, Logic demos, and other audio engineering techniques.