Logic Pro: Creative Reverb Effects

Screen 1. The +/‑ octave delayed shimmer setup.

Dual effects chains offer huge creative potential.

I’ve already covered DIY shimmer reverb in this column, and with a little imagination, it is possible to create many other variations on the theme of less natural‑sounding reverbs that can be put to creative use, especially when working on ambient or cinematic music. Many of these treatments rely on parallel chains of processing, and there are a couple of ways of achieving this in Logic. Perhaps the simplest is to use some or all of the plug‑ins in dual‑mono mode rather than stereo, as this allows you to have completely different settings for the left and right channels. If you are working on a mono track, insert the Direction Mixer first to convert its signal path to stereo.

Octave Delayed Shimmer

Let’s say you want to place an eighth‑note delay before one side of a reverb, but leave the other side working normally. All you need to do to achieve this is to insert a dual‑mono delay before the reverb, set one channel to 100 percent wet, zero percent dry with an eighth‑note delay time and then set the other channel to zero percent wet, 100 percent dry. For a single delay, set the feedback to zero. Feed this into a dual‑mono reverb and you have your delay offset. Of course, your dry sound will also be affected by the delays and reverbs, so if you want to have full control over the wet/dry balance, copy the audio part to a new track and use that as your dry signal.

With this arrangement, you can set the two reverb paths identically, but you can also bring in further processing that differs between the left and right paths. For instance, try applying heavy filtering to a longer reverb on one side so that the timbre of the reverb appears to change as it decays. Another simple trick is to use a dual‑mono pitch‑shifter before the reverb to sharpen one side by a few cents and to flatten the other by a similar amount. This adds a useful texture to the reverb. Or you can shift one side up by an octave and the other down, with different delay times feeding each side. This stacking technique can be used to create novel stereo treatments using any effect plug‑ins that offer a dual‑mono mode. Again, use a copy track as your dry signal, as this allows you to set the effects fully wet. If your dry signal sounds too dry, you can also add a dash of conventional reverb to that, and if your delay sounds still come across as too distinct, you can put two reverbs in series to really diffuse the sound as shown in Screen 1. Logic’s...