Reverse reverb

Another way to highlight a section of your voiceover, or bring it in when things are getting quiet is to use reverse reverbs. This technique lets you hear in your sub conscience what is being said all around you wide, before it is said in mono. I use this technique pretty sparingly and a lot of time only reverse a small passage maybe just one syllable of a word just to bring this in early, but as to not be annoying.

You want to select the section and split the item before and after it, making it is’ own peace. Then set your marker at the start of the item so as to not lose placement. Create a new track as you are on your Voiceover track which will put the track under Voiceover. Call it reverse VO or something to that effect. Copy this item then move down to track two, hit one to drive the play head to your marker and paste with control+v. Solo this track so that you can focus on it.

Now lets reverse the item before adding reverb to it. Select the item with control+left or right arrow, there is only one item on the track. Now press control+shift+end to move to the end of the item. Press alt+i and arrow down to empty item and press enter. Now select both of these items by first pressing control+left arrow until you are back at item1, then, control+shift+right arrow twice. Press control+shift+g to glue the two items together as one. This will make sure that there is time for the reverb tale after the Voiceover. Press F4 to launch the actions dialogue and type in Reverse and hit enter. Tab down to the list view and choose the

Item: Reverse items to new take

Option. Press enter on this and then escape out of the dialogue. Now lets insert reverb as an fx by hitting f and typing in verb. You will use

VST: ReaVerbate (Cockos)

You will go down to the preset

sink – wide wide

Press enter on it and then escape out of the dialogue. Now as you play the project back this small section will be very loud and with way to much reverb. Press control+shift+I to apply the effects on the item. Press F4 to launch the actions dialogue and type in Reverse and hit enter. Tab down to the list view and choose the

Item: Reverse items to new take

Option. Press enter on this and then escape out of the dialogue. Now as you drive to the start of the item with control+left arrow and press space to play you probably won’t hear anything but as you keep listening or start to page down you will start to hear the reverse reverb. Find close to the start of where you start to hear it, pause playback, now lets split the item and delete the first empty item as it were. Now we need to drive back to the start of the item, and play it a little bit you will probably hear that when you press space to play that it’s not silent you can hear the reverb some. Lets play it for a second or so, then pause playback, and then fade in with control+[ left bracket. Now as you play the item back from the start of it by pressing control+left arrow you will hear it come in from silent. Now we want to cut the item. Now unsolo the track and press 1 to set your play head at your previously set marker. Paste the item here on the second track. You will now need to move the item back. You can nudge it with number lock on, 4, and you will have to nudge it quite a ways. What you want is for the end of the reverse verb tail to line up with when you start speaking the passage on your voiceover track. If your reverb tail is coming in way to early so there’s to much sub conscience and it’s distracting, you can set your marker at where playback starts on your main VO track on the item in question, and then page up once, if this is a good length for the tail to fade in you can down arrow to your reverse verb track and split the item here, deleting the first item and then fade the volume of the reverse tale once more so as to come in from silent. Now we want to turn this reverse verb track down by -9 to -12 DB. We can add some compression to the track, you can choose whatever preset sounds best to make it a bit more punchy if you’d like.

Below is an example of Voiceover with reversed reverb.