REVERB

Reverb

Naturally occurring phenomenon when sound reflects off its surrounding surfaces, then these reflections again reflect off the surfaces, then the process continues creating a ‘wash’ of overlapping echoes. These echoes briefly remain audible even after the initial sound source has been taken away

Types of Reverb

• Live Rooms

• Plate Reverb

• Spring Reverb

• Gated Reverb

• Digital Reverb

• Convolution Reverb

• Reverse Reverb

Live Rooms

• A room that is chosen to act as a recording room because of its acoustic properties is called a ‘live room’

• Engineers would place the musician in a booth, room, chamber or hall that had an appropriate reverb character. Sounds very natural but cannot be removed after the initial capture.

• Having a selection of rooms is not within most studios’ budgets and cannot be reproduced when performers play at different venues, so not long before artificial reverbs were produced.

Plate Reverb

• Achieved by feeding an audio signal through a thin metal plate suspended in a frame

• Reverb time can be adjusted by damping the vibrations using felt pads

• Used in many recordings throughout the 60s and 70s.

• Gives a distinctive, rich-sounding reverb due to the sound being fed through metallic plate.

• Most commonly used on vocals and drum sounds.

• EMT 140 was a famous plate reverb, manufactured in the late 50s.

Spring Reverb

• Cheaper, more practical, but less sonically desirable alternative to plate. Units operate on same physical principles but replaces the plate with a loose spring

• Still frequently used in guitar amps

• Spring reverb has a more metallic and less rich sound than a plate reverb

• Fender Twin Deluxe Reverb guitar amp (1963) was one of first with built in spring reverb.

Gated Reverb

• Using a lot of reverb on percussion sounds can muddy a mix, if a reverb is fed through a noise gate, the tail is abruptly cutoff, which prevents this from becoming an issue

• Rather dramatic effect that became closely associated with the classic rock sound of 1980s

• Compression can be used to raise the level of the sustain and reverb tail, giving a denser reverb effect.

Digital Reverb

• First seen in effect units made by Yamaha and Lexicon in 1980s

• Models a reverb by using lots of delays, which are mathematically calculated. Filtering is also applied to simulate the way natural reflections would occur in a room

• Digital reverbs enabled used and manufacturers to store lots of presets

• As CPUs got faster in the 1990s, digital reverb was incorporated as software plug-ins

Convolution Reverb

• Reproduces a real reverb from a real space, and was pioneered by Sony in late 1990s.

• An impulse reflex is generated in a space, and the response is recorded.

• Mathematical algorithms subtract the impulse reflex from the reverb and this can then be applied to other sounds

• Convolution reverb is heavy on processor usage, so it is important to correctly route it in your DAW - Most efficient as an auxiliary send/bus effect.

Reverse Reverb

• Created by playing the reverb tail backwards

• Modern day reverb plug-ins can create reverse reverb at the push of a button

• In 1960s, this would have been created by recording the reverb to tape and then playing it backwards.