When does one use a plate reverb?

[lfm]

I think it's fair to say that plate, a meter sized steel plate, would create rather hard reflections.
Like a room with hard concrete walls and rather long for reflections to kling off.

So if you want that ambience - you use a plate reverb.

And used on an effects bus, the sends are rather low amounts of signal in my view or it takes over completely. Getting very subtle tails. Unless that is what you are going for of course.

When you want a smaller confined space, plate reverbs are maybe not the best choice.

I spend a couple of hours now and then to just sit with a loop of an acoustic guitar or something else and experiment with impulse responses of plate reverbs and everything else. A plugin like Reverberate really needs a lot of experimentation. And I turn off dry signal completely to hear what happends in reverb plugin itself.

I got more and more information from various interviews on places like www.pensadosplace.tv how much time pros spend on mixes and learning what a certain preamps does to sound etc. There aren't shortcuts for experience in the end.

But books are helpful, and The Producers Manual by Paul White give input on many, many techniques pros use.