Two reverbs can help you square certain circles.
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The Script
Let’s say that a band has a new mixing console – one of those “digital rigs in a box” that have come on the scene. The musicians call you in because they need some help getting their monitors dialed up. At some point, the players ask for effects in the monitors: The vocals are too dry, and some reverb would be nice.
So, you crank up an FX send with a reverb inserted on the appropriate bus – and nothing happens.
You then remember that this is meant to be a basic setup, with one console handling both FOH and monitors. Your inputs from the band use pre-fader sends for monitor world, but post-fader sends for FX. Since you weren’t building a mix for FOH, all your faders were all the way down. You don’t know where they would be for a real FOH mix, anyway. If the faders are down, a post-fader send can’t get any signal to an FX bus.
Now, you typically don’t want the monitors to track every level tweak made for FOH, but you DO want the FX sends to be dependent on fader position – otherwise, the “wet-to-dry” ratio would change with every fader adjustment.
So, what do you do?
You can square the circle if you can change the pre/ post send configuration to the FX buses, AND if you can also have two reverbs.
Reverb One becomes the monitor reverb. The sends to that reverb are configured to be pre-fader, so that you don’t have to guess at a fader level. The sends from the reverb return channel should also be pre-fader, so that the monitor reverb doesn’t end up in the main mix.
Reverb Two is then setup to be the FOH reverb. The sends to this reverb from the channels are configured as post-fader. Reverb Two, unlike Reberb One, should have output that’s dependent on the channel fader position. Reverb Two is, of course, kept out of the monitor mixes.
With a setup like this, you don’t need to know the FOH mix in advance in order to dial up FX in the monitors. There is the small downside of having to chew up two FX processors, but that’s not a huge problem if it means getting the players what they need for the best performance.