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I'm confused on the subject of Early Reflections...I'm trying to learn how to mix film, and I've recently learned how insanely important creating the right space with reverb, EQ and delay is.

What do you guys use to create early reflections? I used to think that you did this with the pre delay setting in your reverb, but now I'm not sure.

Do you use delay plugins to do this? The consept keeps slipping away from me...

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3 Answers

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Personally, i use the pre-delay settings in reverb plugs, as that's what they're designed to replicate. From my experience (YMMV), pre-delay acts in the same way as a delay plug would, if it came before your reverb in the chain. It delays your first reflection, and the diffuse reflections that follow.

So, for a large space, you want to set an appropriately long pre-delay. You could work out the time it would take for the sound to travel to the nearest reflective surface and back again and use that as your setting, or you could go with your intuition and see what feels natural.

I'm not sure if anyone out there has found an advantage to using a separate delay plug in, and i'd be keen to hear of any. For now, i'd stick with using pre-delay as it keeps things simple, and doesn't needlessly use up processing power.

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A separate delay plug-in may have more flexible parameter values. That's about it, for just pre-delay usage. Of course with feedback (and the mix amount of the delay) one can also tune and extend the reverb and add a bit more density to it. – Internet Human Dec 7 at 16:24
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This diagram helps explain pre delay and early reflections.

http://www.torgny.biz/images/Reflextionsmonstret.jpg

Some reverbs have a pre delay before the ER section and another before the reverb section. The pre delay helps determine the size of the space you're in, since the longer it takes for the first reflected sounds to get to your ears, the larger the space must be.

Early reflections are built into most natural sounding reverb plugins. It's an essential component of the natural sound. It tells your ears what size the room is and what kind of surfaces it is made of. You can use a multitap delay to get a similar effect, but it would be harder and wouldn't sound as good as the early reflection section built into a good reverb unit.

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@Douglas - Thanks Douglas! That makes more sense now. If you have a good IR (or reverb) early reflections are built in. I got into all this because I don't have Altiverb or Waves IR and I've been trying to 'fake it' with delays and standard verbs. Although I've recently been getting A TONE of use out of the UAD Lexicon 224. Which is what brought up the question of Pre Delay for me since it's a main parameter on the 224. I also have TL labs, but I find their IR library to be completely useless. Maybe I'm mis-using it.... – Jake Dec 8 at 18:14
welcome to to the site, douglas! – Shaun Farley Dec 8 at 21:41
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Pre-delay and early reflections are not the same thing. Pre-delay is the time of dry signal that exists before early reflections arrive. A lot of reverb plug ins allow you to control all this without the need of anything else.

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