How to achieve this reverb?

[Pilutiful]

Anyone has tips on how to add (a lot) of reverb to a vocal track without it become muddy and "washy" ?

A good example is this song by Suede (vocals start at 00:23), which sounds huge, but still clear.

 

[Teegarden]

Just noticed your post, hope the following is still useful:

There's a plugin Chameleon 2 from Accentize that uses machine learning to match reverbs and lets you apply them to your own material. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising:

 How To Match The Reverb Of Location Recordings With Accentize Chameleon 2


I don't have much experience with mixing but the following might help you if you want to have a big reverb:

Less is more with reverb, but here you clearly want to have it stand out as an effect, so avoiding a muddy sound gets more serious:

• Use low pass EQ to cut the lower frequencies
• Preferably use one reverb bus to create cohesion between the vocals and instruments
• Use a pre-delay (setting based on the song tempo, see BPM tempo and delay to time and frequency calculator)
• Don't use long reverb tails
• Sidechain the reverb to the vocal with a compressor that compresses the reverb during the vocal but not in between the singing

You can try the Abbey Roads reverb trick as explained by Dave Pensado: Abbey Road Reverb Technique - Into The Lair

This basically comes down to:

• cutting off the highs and the lows with 12dB/oct before the signal hits the reverb 
• HPF at 500-600Hz and LPF at around 9-10kHz 
• Cut about 3 dB somewhere in the area around 1 to 2kHz depending on the vocal
• The you could add some saturation to beef up the reverb and make it stand out more

 

Edited November 16, 2022 by Teegarden

[Lord Tim]

This sounds like a long hall or plate reverb to me, maybe around 4 seconds or so? Perhaps longer.

It's definitely high passed, and it's low passed too with a very steep decay in the high end once it gets past a few seconds. You can emulate that a little bit by just rolling the high end off, but I suspect this may actually be a convolution reverb IR of a real space (or actually a real space!), or a pretty accurate hall algorithm.

I'd agree with most of what Teegarden wrote there, other than in this case this actually is quite a long reverb tail. But everything else regarding pre-delay and sidechain, etc. is good advice. 

Start simple though, see if you can find a good reverb to match first, and then start seeing what needs to be done after. The easiest thing is the EQ shaping and then the pre-delay. I'd wager that'll get you pretty much where you need to be, but if that fails, ducking the reverb while the vocal is loud with a sidechain is a great way to add clarity.