Top 10 reverb tips

A world without reverb. Imagine listening to a recording and half a minute into a song you notice something wrong. You can’t quite put your finger on it; you just can’t feel the instruments, you feel attacked by the singer’s in-your-face voice and everything is just too…..dry. It’s like listening to music in a vacuum. There’s no space.

Although listening to a completely space-free record is nearly impossible, (unless it was recorded entirely in an anechoic chamber), you can still have a really dry record if you don’t put it through any type of space generating processor. 

Reverb can be perceived as a glue that holds everything together, yet retains enough space to maintain a perceived distance between each element. It makes a three dimensional picture of the sound-scape you just recorded, causing you to feel that you can hear the room accompanied by the instrument.

Different room-modes

There are quite a few different types of room-modes to choose from. Some of the more common types include; Room, Hall, Chamber, Spring, Plate, and Convolution. In our age, we have access to digital simulators which can simulate, quite realistically, all of these programmed room modes. Let’s take a look.

• Room – These types simulate the sound of having recorded something in a room. Whether the parameters are for a big room or a drum room, they usually simulate smaller spaces than their Hall/Chamber counterparts.

• Hall – Rich, warm and big are the first adjectives that come to mind when thinking about the Hall mode. These types simulate halls, whether they be medium halls, concert halls, or whatever lush parameter name the hall has.

• Plate – Plate is a personal favorite of mine for vocals. Live, I probably use it too much, but I just think it does wonder to the vocals, without taking it too far or drowning it. When using the plate mode you are basically sending a sound to a metal plate which vibrates back and forth. These vibrations are picked up and transformed into an audio signal. Plates are very bright but clean, so they suit vocals especially.

• Spring – I was once asked what reverb was when I was fooling around with my guitar. I cranked up the spring-verb on my small practice amp and then kicked it. “That boing you heard?” “Yeah?” “That’s reverb”.Although true is some form, that boing wasn’t all reverb, it was the spring-reverb. The reverb found on guitar amps so most usually used for guitar.

• Chamber – In the old days, studios had so called echo chambers. In these chambers they had speakers that they routed the audio signal they wanted to put enhance with these chambers. The signal, be it guitar, voice or whatever was produced through the speakers into the chamber and picked up by a microphone that was positioned to capture the reverberations in said chambers.

• Convolution – This is the type that allows digital emulation of real three-dimensional spaces. If you’re familiar with Logic's Sound Designer, then you have heard convolution reverb. In order to capture a room’s characteristics, an “impulse” sound is played in a real space, such as an opera house or a cathedral, then recorded into a computer. The impulse sound allows the computer to simulate that space just from the impulse sound. This is possibly the best kind of digital space generator around

Some tips

So now you know a little bit about the modes you most commonly work with. Below I have brainstormed a few fun tips you can use whenever you like to spice things up.

1. A different take on reverse reverb

You all know the classic reverse 'verb, where the tail seems to swoosh in before the phrase of the singer or the hit of the drum. A neat trick for something different is to record an infinite reverb on a different track and then reverse it.

For example, say you have a slow intermission type middle part and the part before ends on a snare hit. You can record that last snare hit on a different track with a big cathedral mode with infinite decay.

Then you can reverse the audio part and put it low in the mix, that way you have a weird controlled reverberated ambiance filling out your slow part. 

2. Gated Reverb on vocals

Gated-reverb on vocals is something I think is pretty cool. I think this is used on the song On call, by Kings of Leon. His vocal is full and echo-y while singing but cuts off abruptly when he stops.

You patch your effect processor to a gate and the sound source is side-chained to the gate.

That way, the gate opens and lets the reverb out whenever the singer is singing, but cuts off as soon as the sound level dips below the threshold of the gate.

3. Making things feel bigger and bigger:

Say you have a really spaced out Sigur Ros rock outro(I’m Icelandic, I’ve got to namedrop here) and the drums are going wild in the end.

It can be fun experimenting with automating a big hall or cathedral mode so the drums, maybe only the snare, or everything, whatever you choose, gets bigger and bigger. I know for a fact that this can work wonders live to really give that last song a huge impact on the audience. 

4. Pan it:

Use mono 'verbs for a mono sound source and pan them to a different location in the mix. It can give an interesting impression.

5. Put space between dry and wet sounds:

Using a standard room mode, adjust the pre-delay to give the impression it is a little big bigger without making it linger too long. On vocals for example, it can give space between the singing and the early reflections.

6. Only 100% wet processed signal:

Send your drums to a big cathedral mode and solo-safe it putting the aux on pre-fader. That way you are only hearing the effected signal and not the original sound source. It can make for a cool fade-in intro for a song. Especially if you add a reverse effect for the change into the real drum kit.

7. Mix it up:

Use different types on the same source. Mixing a couple of types of modes(Plate and chamber for example) can create an interesting effect.

8. Don’t use any:

Keep some instruments effect-free. It can add an interesting contrast to the rest of the song. It can put a solo instrument to the forefront in a special way.

9. Add other effects:

Add other types of effects on the effects return. Try distorting it, phasing it or anything else you can think of.

10. Use REAL reverb:

Try ditching your plugins and use real rooms. Upload your audio clips to Silophone, an old grain silo that has been converted into a do-it-yourself chamber. You upload audio and it is played back in the empty silo, then recorded and sent back to you as a download. 

endless reverb

Reverb is an instrument of endless debate. Everybody has an opinion of what works best(like in everything else regarding audio). But it can often make or break a song, too much fills it with too much space and you can’t hear what it’s all about and too little just kills the emotion of it.

So you have to take particular care in your appliance of space in your mixes, and also be open to a lot of experimentation. Since it is such a big topic you are sure to find something interesting in your endeavors.

Who knows, maybe you’ll be the next one to invent the next “studio trick”?

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