Too much reverb on material, how to decrease it ?

[Pahnikhovsky]

Hallo everybody. I m new to the subject. I d be happy to read some tips-tricks-technicks replays. Thanks

[Adam Dempsey]

Hi. This comes up every now & then. How's your monitoring and how well do you know it? That's ingredient #1, crucial for both objective and subjective judgements.

Secondly - what's the material? Is the 'verb a problem only in sections of the music? The tone of the verb (too dark/woolly/bright)? Is it added 'verb or ambient recorded 'verb?

Short answer: on a finished mix you can't remove reverb of course and the best bet to reduce it would be try bringing the image inwards (less stereo) to mask it a little. Otherwise a touch (just a dB or two) of noise reduction - if you've a good NR processor with options to modify the noise print/sample/estimate and a clean representative sample of said reverb decay (allowing for the fact that NR is threshold dependant & the reverb will contain it's own frequency signature for the source's point in time), so you want an averaged noise estimate of the 'verb as best you can, or modify it accordingly if it's a particular aspect of the 'verb that's intrusive.

Or hire Cedar to try their DNS noise reduction system on it.

Or remix/re-record if possible/practical, but that goes without ......

[Sensenel]

when you're supposed to Master that stuff and not to "rescue" ,tell the Guys to mix it again ! if they like it with too much reverb , then it shouldnt be your Problem ...

[Kiwiburger]

If it really can't be re-mixed ... you could use Mid/Side processing.

In the way that you can pan a stereo track from Left to Right, you can also pan a stereo track from Front to Back using M/S.

The basic method is to clone or mult the Left and Right channels so you have four channels in total.

Sum the first pair to Mono by panning both channels to the centre. The 'Mid' information, which is basically your dry stuff that is common to both side, gets a 6dB boost from the summing. The 'Side' information, which is basically your stereo wet stuff (like reverb) doesn't get any boost.

With the second pair of left & right, do the same but invert the polarity of one side. This cancels out the dry stuff that is common to both sides, leaving just the wet stuff (in mono).

Now, you recombine the mix of these two buses (Mid and Side) back into a stereo Left/Right mix. This is done by creating one side by summing Mid and Side and panning to one side. The other side is created by subtacting Side from Mid and panning to the other side. Subtraction is achieved by Summing with one side channel polarity inverted.

If you are new to this - this sounds strange and convoluted. But the mathematics are solid - you really can turn Left & Right into Mid and Side, and then back again to Left & Right with zero loss of informaton.

The reason to do this is to allow you to change the mix between Mid and Side - Wet & Dry - Front to back.

There are plugins that make this Encoding & Decoding easier.

Sorry if this is stating the obvious.

[Pahnikhovsky]

Thanks for replays Guys.

The material is kind of a la Koshturica-Bregovic folkrock tune . The vox, drums, bass just ok, but rhythm gtrs are criminal throughout the song. Now will try your proposals

[Riccardo]

Originally Posted by Pahnikhovsky

rhythm gtrs are criminal

If the "offending" now I'll assume proven "guilty" GTRs are panned to the sides (likely to be that way) yes, M/S processing could be the most effective way of taming the reverb.
use the eq judiciously and don't forget to switch back and forth frequently to check!

[Pahnikhovsky]

Yes Boss, they are panned to the sides.

BTW
I`v got the guys to remix the tune, so the a... pain is over

But I know now what the M/S thing is, thanks to all