You've got your vocal reverb set up on a mix bus, it's sounding great in the room. But then your vocalist asks for reverb in their ears. You send the bus to their monitor mix, and it works - until you pull back the reverb fader during a spoken section. Now their reverb disappears too.
That's the limitation of routing your reverb bus directly to the mains. Bus-to-bus sends on the WING are post-fader only, so any fader move you make at front of house also affects what your musicians hear.
There's a better way.
Route Your Reverb Through a Channel
Instead of sending your reverb bus directly to the mains, route it to a channel first. Set your mix bus as the input source for an aux channel or a main input channel, and now your reverb returns on that channel just like any other source.
The big benefit: you can send that effect return channel to monitor mixes with a pre-fader tap.
With pre-fader sends, your vocalists get consistent reverb in their ears regardless of what you're doing at front of house.
When you pull back the reverb fader for the room, it doesn't touch what's going to monitors. Your vocalists get the same reverb level in their ears the entire set.
Additional Benefits
Routing through a channel also gives you:
EQ on the return - Cut problem frequencies in the reverb tail or shape the tone to sit better in your mix
Compression - Tame peaks in the reverb or add sustain
EQ on the send - Use the bus EQ to shape what feeds the reverb before it even hits the effect (low cut at 120 Hz, high cut at 10 kHz keeps things clean)
This level of control isn't possible when the reverb bus feeds the mains directly.
Aux Channel vs Main Channel
You can use either an aux channel or a main input channel for your effect return. Aux channels are often unused and work fine for a simple return. Main channels give you more flexibility with tap points and access to gate/dynamics processing if you need it.
Until next time,
Drew
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