How To Create 'Depth Of Field' In Your Mixes

In our simplified scheme, the room is divided into three zones.

Any reverb plug‑in can be used to create the perception of depth — and your mixes will be more engaging and three‑dimensional as a result.

Mixing engineers frequently talk about 'depth of field', and placing instruments in a space. That sounds grand and complicated, but often it simply means using two or three different reverbs. In this article, I want to share a way of creating a really realistic depth of field that can be used to glue your entire mix, with three instances of just one reverb.

To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using different reverbs. In fact, every engineer I know does that, myself included. But doing so does not usually create a realistic perception of depth of field. Rather, it’s about the sound and feel of the specific reverbs used, which is why I call them ‘special sauce’ reverbs.

So what is a realistic depth of field?

Points Of View

Imagine you’re standing on a hill overlooking a small town, and beyond that, you can see all the way to the open sea. In effect, you’ll see three planes of distance. The houses nearest to you will appear quite sharp, and you’ll be able to spot some details. Beyond that, things start to get a little blurry: you can still see the individual houses, but details soon get lost with distance. And further still, everything kind of blends together, with the waterfront and horizon being the only clear things you can distinguish.

If we transfer this basic concept to audio, we end up with three basic planes: near, mid, and far. It is not by coincidence that you can spot these terms in many engineers’ reverb setups. Often they are used more or less interchangeably with the terms short, medium and long. What this usually means is that, whatever three reverbs are used and whatever they are called, one is set for a small ambience, one is set for something bigger such as a room, chamber, plate or hall, and one is set for something really large, which could be anything from a hall to a plate or cathedral. This is all fine and valid, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this. This is how hit records have been mixed for decades. What I’m saying is that using different verbs with different lengths for the different planes does not deliver realistic depth of field perception. So let’s jump right in and see how you can achieve this.

I said at the beginning that you only need one reverb. That’s true, and it can be pretty much any reverb as long as you can set up the following basic parameters: pre‑delay, high cut, and the balance of early reflections and reverb tail. Of course, in the rare case that your favourite reverb doesn’t feature pre‑delay, you could just insert a delay plug‑in before the reverb. I find algorithmic reverbs are preferable for the task, but feel free to use a convolution reverb if you prefer. I use Softube’s classic TSAR Reverb for this myself because it offers all the controls needed, sounds good and works well.

Before setting up any parameters, let’s think about the theory behind it. Imagine you’re not standing on a hill overlooking the town, but at one end of the live room in a recording studio. What actually defines the three planes within a rather small, confined space? It’s the proximity to a wall: not only does a close‑by wall give the most obvious early reflections, it’s the boundaries that define the size and sound of a closed space. So the near, mid and far planes in the live room correspond to close to the wall, further into the room, and finally deep in the centre of the room. You could also think of them as progressing from ‘sharp’ to ‘blurry’. What we want to do is set up these positions in the reverb, but all based on the same room algorithm.

(I’m aware, of course, that this is a simplification of reality. Every room has a lot of boundaries, and they are usually made of different materials, especially in a recording studio. The goal of the whole approach is to provide a very convincing and effective illusion of the real world that’s very easy to use.)

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