MixingReverbVocals

Reverb Pre-Delay And Decay, Set From The Song

Pre-delay decides when the room starts, decay decides when it stops. Both can be read off the tempo and the phrasing instead of guessed from a preset.

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By Nolvra

When The Room Starts, When It Stops

Most reverb settings get chosen by scrolling presets until one sounds big enough. Two of them are better chosen from the song itself. Pre-delay is the gap between the dry sound and the moment the reverb starts. Decay is how long the reverb takes to die away. Get the first wrong and the reverb sits on top of the words. Get the second wrong and each phrase is still ringing when the next one starts. Both have a sensible starting value you can work out from the tempo and from how the part is phrased, before you touch anything else.

What Pre-Delay Actually Buys You

In a real room the first reflections arrive a little after the direct sound, and the ear uses that gap to tell the source from the space. A reverb with no pre-delay starts at the same instant as the vocal, so the onset of every word, the consonant that carries most of the meaning, arrives already smeared. Add a short gap and the consonant lands dry and clear, with the room blooming just after it. The voice reads as close to you while the space still reads as large.

The gap can also be timed. One beat lasts 60000 divided by the tempo, in milliseconds. At 140 BPM that is about 429 ms for a quarter note, 214 ms for an eighth, 107 ms for a sixteenth and 54 ms for a thirty second. A pre-delay on one of those values makes the reverb's onset fall on the grid, so it pushes the groove instead of blurring it. Short values in the tens of milliseconds keep a vocal intimate; a value near a sixteenth or an eighth turns the reverb into something closer to a rhythmic echo of the room.

Setting Both From The Track

Find The Gaps In The Phrasing

Play the part and listen to the space between phrases, not to the reverb. A dense verse with short gaps needs a tail that is mostly gone by the next line. A slow ballad or a sparse hook leaves room for a long one. That gap is your decay budget.

Set Decay To Fit The Gap

Raise decay until the tail just fills the space between phrases and fades before the next one begins. In PLUME decay runs from 0.2 to 70 seconds and opens at 3.0, and the window draws it as the length of the tail, so you can see it end as well as hear it. A tail that runs into the next phrase is too long however good it sounds in solo.

Time The Pre-Delay

Work out the beat in milliseconds and start from a short fraction of it, then move between the grid values by ear. PLUME takes pre-delay from 0 to 2000 ms, and a bare number typed into the field is read as milliseconds. The PLUME quickstart lists every field and the units it accepts.

Trim What Comes Back

Cut the low end of the reverb so it does not thicken the bass, and the top so it does not fight the sibilance of the dry vocal. PLUME's Low Cut runs from 20 Hz to 1 kHz and its High Cut from 1 to 24 kHz, and both act on the reverb only, never on the dry signal.

Decay Is A Mix Decision, Not A Room Size

A long decay is not the same thing as a big room, and treating it that way is how mixes get washed out. A short decay on a large sounding mode can feel huge without clouding the next phrase, while a long one on a small mode builds up underneath everything. Run the reverb on a send so several parts share one space, as reverb send versus insert explains, and judge decay with the whole track playing rather than the vocal soloed. If a part needs a tail that never ends, a Freeze that holds the tail does that job more cleanly than a decay pushed to its maximum.

Starting Points That Usually Hold

  • A fast rap or a dense verse: a short pre-delay in the tens of milliseconds and a decay that is gone before the next bar.
  • A slow sung hook: a pre-delay near a sixteenth or an eighth of the beat, so the words stay dry, and a longer tail that fills the gap after the line.
  • Drums: keep pre-delay short or the room separates from the hit and reads as a flam.
  • Anything already recorded in a room: take that room out first, since reverb printed into a vocal stacks under any reverb you add.
  • Always set decay with the full track playing, then check it once more in mono.
  • Change one value at a time and match the level, because more reverb nearly always sounds better for the first few seconds.

Build The Space, Then Hold It

PLUME pairs three classic reverb modes with three Space modes and a Freeze that holds the tail. Decay, pre-delay and both cuts take typed values with units.

See PLUME

FAQ

What does pre-delay do on a reverb?

It sets the gap between the dry sound and the start of the reverb. A short gap keeps the onset of each word or hit clear while the space still sounds large behind it.

How do you calculate pre-delay from the tempo?

Divide 60000 by the tempo to get one beat in milliseconds, then use a fraction of it. At 140 BPM a quarter note is about 429 ms, a sixteenth about 107 ms and a thirty second about 54 ms.

How long should reverb decay be on vocals?

Long enough to fill the space between phrases and short enough to fade before the next line starts. The phrasing of the part sets the budget, not a fixed number.

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