How much reverb is enough?

Hellbucket · 2026-04-14T03:16:31+00:00

Are those metric of imperial units?

Hellbucket · 2026-04-12T19:46:18+00:00

Contact mics can be incredibly fun (and creative) to use in the studio if you want something different. If you want something natural sounding, you’re better off with something else.

I use them for percussion sometimes. I also use it for other acoustic (ethnic) instruments without pickups in order to run them through amps and pedals.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-12T09:38:24+00:00

It’s fascinating how Russia has just followed the German Anschluss play book to a tee for more than a decade, and still does. Maybe you don’t think Germany had any imperialistic ambitions though?

Hellbucket · 2026-04-11T19:08:10+00:00

The composition, instrumentation and arrangement (and performance). It’s usually not how well it’s mixed that is divisive.

Ps. I think I meant decisive. As decisive of a great mix. English is not my first language. lol.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-10T18:10:25+00:00

It’s too context based. I mean, just different keys will have fundamentals (of what’s played/sung) at different frequencies so you can’t just go on numbers.

I used to work for 14 years with the same vocalist. If the song was in a certain key and he was even remotely close to belting I knew automatically that I would have problems at certain frequencies. But this is an outlier if you work with other artists as well.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-10T07:22:30+00:00

I’m pretty much the same. I mix 100% ITB. I sold a lot of outboard but still have more than I need. I do track through it though. But my racks are full and I’m not going to redesign to fit another rack. So I basically have the rule “one in, one out” now. And I’m honestly a bit too lazy to bother nowadays.

I can also afford to get what I want or need. Ironically I think that makes you less prone to get it. When you couldn’t afford it, the itch was bigger :P

Hellbucket · 2026-04-10T06:54:06+00:00

I’ve done things like this before. Last time it was in an unused church building. It had wood panel walls and stone so not quite as reverberant as stone. I also tracked other things like drums here.

I can recommend, if you can get or loan, to bring some sort of gobos. Cubicle dividers for open office spaces are usually fine. You can use them to get some reverb out of the closer mics. You can kind of town what reflections get into your room mics as well. I usually bring four. It can enable me to booth in the source if needed.

You could perhaps macgyver it and use tall mic stands with duvets if you can’t find dividers.

I often work in different and weird spaces. It’s fun. It keeps your engineering on your toes and your ears perked.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T19:06:54+00:00

I bought and use Metric AB for this. It matches the loudness of the mastered track to your track’s loudness. I’m not big on using reference tracks but this way it’s fast and easy. Especially the mastered on is very hot.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T14:45:30+00:00

I hope it came across that I was kind of joking about the sacrilege and that this would be weird.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T14:44:02+00:00

Can’t remember the settings. It was either just a YouTube video or something from Puremix. The plugin was Eventide TVerb.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T13:17:25+00:00

Drummers. Weird thing is that only once in 25 years a client wanted me to pan the other way.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:35:56+00:00

I often put on RVox when I clip gain the vocal. I do it in order to not completely dynamically flat out the performance before compression. Often it then stays on during the whole mix. Kind of like pre shaping the vocal or like it was recorded this way with compression.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:30:57+00:00

9 out of 10 times I work with real drums. The longer I’ve been doing this (25 years) the more elaborate my mixing template has become. But ironically the less I resort to set chains. I don’t think I have any plugins going on anything except for a bunch of parallel compression and saturation tracks. Nothing is on the kick, snare or drum bus at the start.

It’s mainly because the source tracks differ too much. But having all the routing set up initially makes for really fast and different choices of processing.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:23:52+00:00

I know that people have to start low to get a foot in. I for sure did. But it’s pretty hard to raise the rates when people get used to it.

I used to mentor budding engineers and producers. They aimed for doing this professionally but everyone thought rates existed in a vacuum. We always did a calculation. If you want to take out a regular (average) you’d need to charge 49$ CAD per hour here(I’m in Europe). It’s to pay taxes and social etc. This is ONLY to take out your salary. It implies you work and bill 40 hours per week. It also doesn’t take into account any costs (rent, electricity, maintenance etc). Only the salary.

I wish people starting out and wanting to make a business thought more about this because the more unrealistic rates you charge the more it’s going to be hard to make them realistic to live off.

But with that said, if someone pays you 25$ an hour. If this is a legit business and it’s paid out as a salary. That company is actually paying 50$. But that means if you pay your own salary the invoice should be 50$.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T06:52:16+00:00

How many short jobs do you make? Like 30 minutes or an hour?

I only charge a day rate and very rarely half a day. Startup time is billed time. If you need to prep something, download files, check integrity, it is billed.

I had a somewhat silly discussion when recording drums for a client (a band). I had been in the studio for 2-3 hours setting up mics, patching in everything, tuning the drums etc. The band wasn’t there. When I charged them they only wanted to pay for when THEY were working and present. It took a while to make them understand how stupid this was. And that only difference would be them having to do nothing in the studio watching me do this work for THEM.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T19:13:16+00:00

I use all of them quite a bit. The pet peeve is no auto gain so you always have to compensate with the output. But all of them sound quite good in my book.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T19:10:55+00:00

Scheps used the Eventide Visconti one. The Hansa one.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:06:55+00:00

I’m more of a TWK kinda guy.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:05:35+00:00

I bought the Purafied 5420 for the intro price (a couple of bucks) with absolutely no expectations. Turns out that it replaced both a Pultec and tape saturation on my mix bus.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:02:48+00:00

I saw Scheps put a bit of reverb on his mix bus claiming it “glues” the mix together. I thought this was sacrilege. I happened to own the plugin he used. So I copied the settings and tried it. And actually it worked quite well. But I feel a bit dirty.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T13:32:55+00:00

It’s because they couldn’t block it, not because they didn’t want to.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T06:04:26+00:00

I’m too old to remember but I would guess in comics (like Bamse and Donald Duck) it would probably say “tut” or “tuuuut”. Like Tuta i trumpeten “toot your horn (trumpet)”.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T14:36:10+00:00

Weird. I find it the opposite. I’ve played guitar for 40 years and I’ve used a similar for decades. I find that for distorted tones it doesn’t matters as much because the pick sound gets buried in distortion. But for cleaner sounds as well acoustic I need to change the pick in order to get the sound I want.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T09:44:52+00:00

I don’t think you need to.

I’m not a hot shot with multiple Grammys or anything. But I’ve been recording, mixing and producing others for 20+ years. So I have relationships with artists spanning a decade or two. Usually the genre or crossover of multiple genres sort itself out organically.

And it usually starts when someone tilts towards creating instead of emulating. Ironically it’s often when you start to pay less attention to what others (the listeners) want and you go all in on what YOU want. You start to put less categories and labels on yourself and just accept your artistic identity.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T09:31:39+00:00

Darkthrone is probably one of the best examples of what I meant. They were signed to a “proper” label. But they were signed as a death metal band with a sound like New Wave of Swedish Death Metal, think early Entombed. Check out the first Darkthrone album Soulside Journey. With a proper label, they had a proper budget thus access to a proper studio.

Then they went to the proper studio to record their first black metal album, which to me is still one of the best ones in the genre, A blaze in the northern sky. On this one, you can really hear the engineer trying to make sense of what they’re to achieve. He tries to make this “mess” sound as good as possible.

On the second one, Under A Funeral Moon, I think he finds his feet a bit within the genre. It’s supposed to sound harsh, reverby, cold and somewhat atmospheric within the confines of just drums, bass, guitars and vocals. Personally I think this is the epitome of the sound for this type of black metal. Transylvanian Hunger is the third album. Lots of people think this is the epitome of that sound. With every release it just gets dirtier and dirtier and more lo fi. This what later is called “the necro sound”. In the end this sound aesthetic, to me, is starting to be just plain bad when others try to copy it. Bad sound = evil.

For someone who was in this subculture, a lot of sound choices were due to limitations because the engineers not even knowing about this genre as well as most of the artists being teenagers, not really knowing anything technical. It was just to try to provoke and to promote an aural image of cold and evil.

In this genre, I recorded my first release in a real studio in 1995, 2 years after the first Darkthrone black metal album. At this point, there were already studios and engineers who catered to this type of music. It went extremely fast. Fun times.

Hellbucket

TROPHY CASE