Girls With Glasses - HB Mix

[pauli]

... that treats each channel individually based upon where it will sit in the mix spatially...

That's the ticket, right there. If you go into it with your vision for the song in mind and keep your predelays and decay times under control, you can't go too far wrong. I like to build the ambiance by introducing each instrument as I would when building the balance, then fading in the send levels with the return channels set at unity gain.

Sometimes all that routing can be pretty CPU expensive, and the sort of high spec reverbs you'd use in this situation don't help matters, so I figured out a cool trick to reduce CPU usage and limit how much submixing I have to do. It's often desirable to use longer predelays on tracks that start sinking into the mix before you get enough room sound, but that'd mean a duplicate of the reverb you're using for the rest of the mix with a different pre-delay setting, and that would get nasty really quickly if you were using a convolution verb... so if that becomes a problem, I've found that you can route those channels through a slave delay channel that simply delays the signal going into the reverb, so no doubling up on effects is necessary.

You can use a similar strategy with a slave EQ channel.... you can cut the highs only on the signal that's going into the reverb, and you'll have a much darker reverb return for that individual track while leaving the rest of the channels alone... put a few ms delay on that EQ channel and the reverb return will sound further away from the sound source due to the delayed, dampened reflections... so you could actually use reverb to bring something forward in the mix.

How often do I have the opportunity to use these tricks? Almost never. It's fun to talk about it, though