How To Use Reverb on Guitar | What EVERYONE Should Know

[Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so if you play guitar at all you've spent any time messing around with guitar amps or tones or pedals or effects or anything you probably know about reverb most of you watching this channel probably have at least one reverb pedal or an amp with a built-in reverb and like me it might be one of your favorite effects i love reverb i use it all the time it can do a lot it's an incredibly versatile and useful tool not just for guitar players but for sound design and mixing and producing in general but it can be a little bit confusing it can be a little overwhelming there's tons of different types of reverbs and how to know when to use a reverb and what type and how much i mean there's a lot to it and especially for guitar players reverbs can get out of hand pretty quickly and cause muddy tone they can cause you to get buried in a mix and in general i think this is one of the effects that a lot of guitar players especially people that are new to the electric guitar and starting to figure out their tone and their sound this is one of the things that can really overwhelm people and uh kind of confuse them so in today's video we're going to talk about reverb for guitar how to use reverb on guitar reverb pedals reverb plugins natural room reverb and i'm going to teach you basically everything i know about using reverb effectively so before we get started click subscribe down below hit the bell to be notified when i'm posting new videos and starting to do live streams again here on this channel now that i'm in the new space and also if you're interested in guitar tone and learning more about guitar tone and amps and effects and how they all work together i made a video course on that last year called the tone course and if you click through the link in the description box down below you'll get 20 off of the tone course all right let's uh jump in and start talking about reverb what is it now i think in order to get the most out of the reverb effect as a guitar player it helps to have an understanding of what reverb actually is what it's doing and the different types of reverbs that we have available to us as guitar players today so reverb is a really simple concept it's simply the continuation of a sound or sound waves that build up after reflections off of surfaces after the sound stops now reverb is around us all the time obviously any room you're in or even outside you're hearing sound reflections bouncing off of surfaces hitting your ears at different intervals and that is something that the human brain actually accounts for and it's so common that in most of our daily lives we don't really even notice it in fact we've become so accustomed to it if you've ever seen videos of people in anechoic chambers completely sound proof rooms everyone seems to have the same kind of sensation of feeling really strange really out of place and it can actually cause auditory hallucinations mary spinder did a video on this a couple years ago that i'll link down below it's really really fascinating now there's several different types of reverb that you're going to encounter when it comes to reverb as a guitar effect the first and most common and natural one is the actual natural space the room reverb that you might be playing in at the time this can be your bedroom this can be a venue or in some high-end studios like abbey road or capital studios in la they actually built chambers deep underground underneath the studio these large rooms with nothing but reflective surfaces and curved corners and where they would actually pump in the sound of whatever they wanted to reverberate uh the vocal or guitar sound or drum sound and pick that up with mics and nowadays there's plugins that will emulate that [Music] next up we have plate reverbs now plates are really fascinating a plate reverb literally is a plate of metal with a transducer attached to it that feeds the signal of whatever you're trying to reverberate and the plate actually moves it actually vibrates creating the reverb where a contact microphone is attached to the other end of the plate essentially picking up the reverb this is also a really famous studio tool the emt 140 is the most common and most well known of these plate reverbs and there's actually pedal we're going to look at today that emulates the emt-140 and plate reverbs are fantastic on guitars they can be really smooth and really warm or they can be bright and metallic sounding plates are some of my favorites to use especially for ambient reverbs [Music] so [Music] so [Music] then we have the spring reverb now as a guitar player you're probably the most familiar with the spring reverb if you have a fender amp for example you probably have some kind of spring reverb in your amp itself now spring reverbs are some of my favorites i've got a great spring reverb and my tape echo here that i'll show you in a minute but they are known for giving you that drip as it's known the surf guitar the dick dale thing spring reverbs are ubiquitous with guitar sounds and again they're some of my favorites to [Music] use [Music] and then you're gonna have digital reverbs now digital reverbs are kind of a wide gamut you can have things like the lexicon 224 which was a famous studio digital reverb from the 1980s that was used on all kinds of records and that was a digital unit that was meant to emulate room sounds they were using digital technology primitive digital technology to emulate large halls or cathedrals or caves even but modern digital reverbs from strymon or source audio or even tied for example will do more than just the vintage 80s digital reverbs did they can emulate springs they can emulate plates they can emulate reverbs that don't exist like eventide's black hole algorithm for example digital reverbs are fantastic for getting those experimental sort of sound design [Music] reverbs [Music] okay so one of the most important things to understand when it comes to reverb for guitar is pre-delay now a lot of reverb pedals that you buy today will have a pre-delay control on them and it's important that you understand it because this is what makes the difference between a really muddy washy reverb that buries your guitar in the mix and something that sounds nice and lush and full especially when you start getting into ambient reverbs and more ethereal sounding stuff when you want to preserve the tone of your guitar and you want to cut through the mix with that reverb still there it's all about pre-delay so if you look down here on my test pedal board of science you can see i've got the golden reverberator from ua this is on loan to me from ua and i think this is a pretty good example of what we're talking about i've got a plate emt 140 reverb pulled up here and right now it's just set up for kind of a nice sort of warm lush i would say like a medium plate sound [Music] and i'm going directly out of the pedal into the front of a clean amp back there so what we're going to do is dial up this reverb to make it more of like an ambient sort of ethereal thing so i've brought up the decay time so the reverb is going to last longer and i'm bringing up the mix and now this is what we have [Music] now that's a lot of reverb and especially because i'm on the neck pickup of this gold top here you can tell it's starting to bury the guitar it's getting really muddy and washy but this middle control here this is the pre-delay now what pre-delay does is control the amount of time between the initial transient or the attack of the note and when the reverb actually comes in so with the pre-delay all the way down right now you're going to hear the reverb come in immediately after i pick a note there's no delay there as soon as i play a note the reverb is filling in underneath so what i'm going to do is bring my pre-delay up to give me a little bit of a gap ideally what i want to have is the note come through nice and clear and then the reverb fill in underneath and again this is really useful for these big washy long lush reverbs like this [Music] so that's better but it's still not there it's still really muddy and really washy so i'm gonna bring that pre-delay really high up on this [Music] pedal [Laughter] it becomes really apparent on that single note stuff because the initial attack of the note is coming through so you can hear the tone of the guitar you can hear the timbre of the actual note and then the reverb is coming in behind it to sort of fill in the space underneath now this is a lot of reverb in reality i probably wouldn't use this much in fact i'd probably dial this in to something a little bit closer to this kind of sound and then do a similar picking part [Music] now interestingly with room reverbs pre-delay is how you can actually dial in the size or the sense of the size of the room pre-delay actually happens in a real space the bigger the space the more pre-delay there actually is there's more time between the sound source emitting the sound the reflections coming back in the larger room so a pre-delay control on a room reverb sound can actually make the room feel bigger or smaller depending on what you're going for now i'm a bit of a reverb junkie if anyone who's watching this video has gigged with me at all you probably know that i tend to use a lot of reverb sometimes too much reverb and this is a lesson that i've learned myself over the last few years when not to use your reverb see a lot of players myself included can begin to rely on the reverb you can kind of use it as a bit of a crutch especially when it's like a nice luscious spring that's built into your amp you can sort of use it to kind of hide your crimes if you will and there's nothing wrong with that i mean i've done that for years and i still like to play with reverb but there's a few situations to look out for where it's actually better to turn the reverb off first one that comes to mind for me is if you're at a gig and you're in a venue let's say you're in a club or a small theater or a bar that has a natural sort of short decay room reverb if you're playing in a space like that on a stage like that you don't need to use a reverb that's always on instead you might use it as an effect or a color you might use a nice ambient digital reverb or you might use something that's going to call out or stand out as a character effect but i would not use a room reverb for example because you're in a room there's no reason to add on to what's already naturally happening in that room again ask me how i know the other thing to look out for is when you're recording or playing rhythm guitar parts specifically guitar parts that are over driven check this out all right so let's say you're playing a rhythm part and you want something that's nice and tight you're going to do like a palm muting driving rhythm part i've got some gain dialed into the amp here that is amp overdrive not coming from a pedal so you've got this part and the song that's like a [Music] pretty straight ahead palm muting part we've all done it a million times now listen to what happens when i kick on this spring reverb [Music] [Laughter] now that is an extreme example and it's made worse by the fact that i'm using a pedal going into the front of an overdriven amp that leads me to my next point where to put your reverb in your signal chain there's a few different options and they both have different effects where you end up putting your reverb in your signal chain has a massive impact on its sound and what it's going to do and it's important to consider based off of what you're looking to get out of your reverb sound now most guitar players myself included tend to use a reverb pedal on their board just going into the front end of a tube amp which is what i'm doing right now i've got the golden set up using the digital delay setting the lexicon 224 setting and i've got it going straight into the front of a tube amp that is slightly overdriven and again that's not coming from an overdrive pedal that's coming from the actual amp itself now listen to what happens when i turn the reverb on i've got a pretty heavy-handed digital reverb here because i really want to show you the difference between the two [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you can hear the reverb trails themselves are actually pretty distorted they're pretty overdriven which makes sense because it's going into the front end of an overdriven amp so let's say i wanted something that was a cleaner reverb sound i wanted the tone of the amp to come through but i wanted the reverb trails to be nice and clean and not distorted and affected by the amps tone well then you would put your reverb after the amp now in an actual amp this would mean using an effects loop if your amp is equipped with one effectively giving it a cleaner overall output a cleaner signal now i made a whole video on effects loops a few years ago you can check out up here if you're interested but what i've actually got going on here is a reverb plugin the same lexicon 224 plug-in from the same company ua although they are slightly different the algorithm in the pedal is a little bit different than the plug-in so this is not a completely fair comparison but i did my best to kind of dial in the same type of reverb sound between the two and you should hear what i'm talking about so i'm going to play the pedal into the front of the amp and then i'm going to mute that and play the actual plug-in that's after the amp and you should be able to hear the difference [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] so in that example you can tell the difference they are completely different sounds not to mention the fact that that's in stereo this is in mono but that has all of the fidelity still intact it's got basically the entire range of the reverb trail the whole frequency response of the reverb trail intact whereas the pedal going into the front of the amp is being colored and affected by the preamp section itself again that's not a bad thing it just depends on what you're looking for i actually think the pedal going into the front of the amp sounds really cool and that's typically how i run it but depending on what you're looking for where you place the pedal or the effect in the chain has a massive difference on its response so that's how to use reverb on guitar at least how i think about using reverb on guitar let me know what you thought about today's video in the comments section down below what's your favorite reverb how do you like to run it in your signal chain do you play it through your effects loop or do you even use reverb at all i know there's a lot of guitar players out there that don't even touch it which i think is a shame because it's such a versatile and useful effect you can do so much more with a good reverb than just big washy ambient tones but that's another video as always if you'd like to support the channel you can check out the links in the description box down below i'll have links to the gear that i used in today's video those will be affiliate links so if you buy something through that i get a small commission which helps me out in running the channel so thank you also don't forget if you're interested in the tone course you can get 20 off via the discount code in the description box down below and if you haven't done so already be sure to subscribe thank you guys so much for watching and supporting and subscribing and everything i really appreciate it once again my name is rhett shull and remember there is no plan b

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 159,862

Keywords: how to use reverb, home studio, home recording, best reverb pedal, reverb plugin, music production, plate reverb, strymon big sky, recording studio, reverb, how to use reverb on guitar, reverb for guitar, rhett shull, reverb pedal

Id: Xz5dNT0SJbE

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021