Post a lush aux chain.

[TubularCorporation]

This has been the first aux on the last half dozen or so tracks I've worked on:

TDR Proximity, "stereo widener" preset loaded and the fader pushed all the way to the top

->

lowpass around 10k, highpass aorund 600hz then fine tune by ear (I'm using TB Equalizer but any transparent EQ would be fine here, and Airwindows lowpass and highpass would probably sound great too, since they sound great everywhere else)

->

Valhalla Vintageverb

->

Airwindows Distance with the "distance" fader set by ear (always sounds best somewhere around 10% up - I'm not home so I can't check the actual settings but they're well below 50% and probably a bit above 10%, in the zone where it sounds like the low mids are getting boosted a bit, before it starts to make everything sound quieter; no clue what that is in Chris' arbitrary "miles" scale)

 

 

 

 

Sounds great, and other than Vintageverb it's all free.

 

 

EQ->vintageverb->TDR Proximity also sounds good, too, if you want to push the reverb forward in the mix, but it's a less natural sound and so far it's only been useful on individual tracks for me, the other one is great as a kind of glue reverb that gets at least a tiny bit of almost every track (including the other aux busses).

[ZoeB]

A delay panned left and another panned right, set to different (tempo synced, or approximation thereof) delay lengths. Slightly more interesting than a single ping pong delay. I used these on a sparse high piano part on my last track, and they seemed to work well.

[TubularCorporation]

A delay panned left and another panned right, set to different (tempo synced, or approximation thereof) delay lengths. Slightly more interesting than a single ping pong delay. I used these on a sparse high piano part on my last track, and they seemed to work well.

 

With tempo synced delays I usually find a way (depends on the delay) to push it ever so slightly out of time, just a couple milliseconds will do it.  Tap tempo delays are great for that, too. Makes things sound a little more organic and if you're using a lot of feedback the echoes drift more out of time as they decay.

 

Lately I've been using Valhalla Freqecho a lot, too, and that sounds great if you set it to shift the delay pitch just a tiny bit, usually less than .5hz.  Not enough that you really hear it, just enough that it FEELS different.

 

For some reason I've never actually tried what you described though, definitely going to mess with that

 

Autopan before reverb on an aux sounds great, too, I really like Melda's free autopan plugin for that (and in general, some of the slightly wobbly LFO waveforms you can get out of it are great).

[TubularCorporation]

i think some verbs will sum the signal to mono before adding the effect so you'll want to check yours doesn't do that (i'm guessing valhalla wouldn't but who knows)

 

i like distortion after reverb, and / or compression to make it sound really big when sounds hit. i use TAL-tube so much it's not funny. 

 

using effect racks in ableton allows for so many possibilities, and they're so easy to put together quickly. a lot of the time i'll play with 3 chains in parallel each with filters to isolate the lows, mids and highs and then experiment with different effects.

 

when i think of 'lush' effects i'm thinking saturation, chorus, delay, reverb and compression. slow moving flange and phaser make things more airy and atmospheric to my ears, but faster ones work better to thicken out the texture, though i would turn down the modulation amount as the rate increases if the plugin doesn't automatically do that. now that i think about it i've basically listed most of the common effect types, but i guess i would say obvious ones to avoid would be frequency shifters, ring modulators, metallic comb filters, sample rate reduction (though an odd nosdam feel can work well). anything that creates or emphasises inharmonic freqs would not be that lush imo. 

 

Yeah, 9 times out of 10 "lush" = "reverb" to me.  Or possibly Reverb into another reverb.

 

Reverbs with long tails set low in the mix, but with slow attack, high ratio compression (or better still, upward compression!) on the master is something that I'd characterize as "lush as fuck" when it works right.  the actual tracks are relatively dry sounding, but the reverb kind of swells and blooms up out of the spaces in between.  Similar to regular compressor pumping but not the same, more kind of hazy or pillowy than the rhythmic, driving sound you get with a pumping compressor.  I keep the modded DBX 117 I mentioned in another thread around specifically because of how well it does this sound (if you can keep the noise under control).  I haven't spent nearly enough time with it to be good  at using it yet, but Airwindows Surgetide seems to be made for doing stuff like that without  compression.

[Guest]

Reverb wet = 100, dry = 0, set reverb length to max, paulstretch 600%.

[TubularCorporation]

"Balloon Payment" by Pauline Oliveros (track one of the 1991 Deep Listening Band album 'The Readymade Boomerang') makes a pretty nice impulse response.

[ZoeB]

 

With tempo synced delays I usually find a way (depends on the delay) to push it ever so slightly out of time, just a couple milliseconds will do it.

 

 

Yeah, I tend to set mine manually these days, and make them everso slightly out.  I made a handy program to tabulate the MS, to use as a starting point.  Sometimes it's just easier by ear, though.  I'm totally digging an oldfashioned aesthetic right now.

[TubularCorporation]

 

 

With tempo synced delays I usually find a way (depends on the delay) to push it ever so slightly out of time, just a couple milliseconds will do it.

 

 

Yeah, I tend to set mine manually these days, and make them everso slightly out.  I made a handy program to tabulate the MS, to use as a starting point.  Sometimes it's just easier by ear, though.  I'm totally digging an oldfashioned aesthetic right now.

 

 

Nice, back when I was almost completely out of the box I actually had a printout of a big spreadsheet I made with the delay time in MS for about a half dozen common note values for every tempo from 60 to I think 180 bpm, in 1bpm increments.

[mcbpete]