Well, I just finished mastering this: https://soundcloud.com/auralaxiom/zimmer-piece-mastered
Obviously, that’s not an AJ marketplace piece
In any case, that “depth” you are talking about is often achieved by subtle boosts to your lows and highs. And no, DON’T get rid of your reverb…bad idea. What you need is the right reverb. Space Designer is really quite good, but you have to work with it. Here are my suggestions for verb:
Have 3-4 verb sends. I have one verb send for each section in the orchestra–brass, woodwinds, strings, and percussion. Before each instance of my reverb (which is East West Spaces–well worth the money, and the best convolution reverb out there IMO) I have an instance of Ozone. That way I can create some space in my EQ spectrum and it doesn’t get too cluttered/phasey. I usually tend to do wide, shallow cuts in the highs, and high pass filters (i.e. cutting the lows). This can free up some much needed frequency bandwidth in your mixes.
As for piano in particular, you should be able to get plenty of depth with Alicia’s Keys. Generally, for cinematic stuff, you want a warmer sound–some subtle low-mid boosting helps. Just be careful that it doesn’t get muddy. A little bit of compression wouldn’t hurt, although I’ll admit I rarely use it. I also like to brighten it up with broad shallow boosts around 6k-7k.
For mastering, a really big secret is mid-side EQ. Mid-side EQ is exactly what it sounds like: One set of controls EQ’s the middle of the stereo image, while the other set controls the extreme sides of the stereo field. VERY subtle boosting–we’re talking around .5db–in the low mids in the center and very subtle cuts in the highs, coupled with boosting the highs in the sides and cutting the low mids can add an incredible depth to your master. I generally crisp up the sides with a 1db boost around 5k with a narrow band, then boosting everything past 16k. I like Native Instruments Passive EQ for this. It’s well worth the money and this technique can also be used on piano tracks.
Now, another huge (bigger than the mid-side EQ stuff) effect that can add depth is a quality stereo imager, like the one in Ozone. Most orchestral mixes have a lot of phasing issues around in the fundamental frequencies (lows and low mids), so you’ll want to narrow those bands–otherwise, your masters will sound kinda squishy and won’t have a good center. Then, you can expand the stereo image in the highs. Ozone has four bands, and I usually set the crossovers from 0-150, 150-1200, 1200-5000, 5000 on up. Then I usually scale back the stereo image on the lows to around -30%, -25% low-mids, 12% highs, 15% past that. These are just general numbers here, obviously you’ll have to suit it to your mix.
Otherwise, for my mastering chain it’s: compressor --> mid-side EQ --> (sometimes another compressor, sometimes not) --> Ozone. In Ozone, I do a little bit more EQ’ing, set the multi-band compressor to be lightly compressing most of the frequencies (tends to smooth out the mix), and then use the stereo imager and the limiter.
Also, to add perceived broadness, subtle boosts around 100 will help tremendously.
This is just my way of doing it, and I’m sure some of the things I do are “wrong.” But if you like my mixes (and you might not), that’s how I get them.