The Truth About Reverb Pedal Placement

i'm mason maringella from vertex effects aka the rig doctor and today i'm going to explain to you how you may be using your reverb pedals and effects incorrectly in my suggested order in applications based on your desired result let's do it [Music] i've noticed as of late an outpouring of reverb related videos a lot of people talking about amp reverb versus pedal reverb one might be preferable over the other and looking at some classical songs that utilize reverb and how you might be able to incorporate today's reverbs in order to create some of those classic songs one thing however that i don't notice in this conversation about reverb is about the placement of reverb pedals and how maybe the place that we're putting reverb pedals in relationship to our amplifiers is actually not at all resembling how it would be in the classical vintage context or even the studio context so today we're going to go over multiple different styles of reverb pedals and amp reverb and how to take today's pedals and not only incorporate them in the way that classical vintage two bass reverbs might be in amplifiers but also how you might recreate some of those classical studio sounds and be able to really mix and match your reverb pedals to best suit the type of sound that you're going for whether that's more of a studio or modern type sound or one of those vintage tube and spring reverb type sounds so let's talk first about spring reverb often we see people talking about spring reverb in terms of either on-board amplifier reverb like on a fender deluxe reverb like the amplifier we're going to be using today you might also see spring reverb talked about in terms of a tank that actually is kind of a disaggregated version of what's inside of a fender amp and maybe gives you a little bit more control fender still makes these units in a reissue model and then there's also actually companies that make spring reverb pedals they actually incorporate a full spring inside of them guys like carl martin surfy bear and crazy tube circuits all make wonderful and amazing spring reverb pedals that take a lot of the great vintage vibe of an original fender spring unit and incorporate that into something a little bit more pedal board friendly but also there are spring reverb emulating pedals that also sound great that are fully digital the fender reverb is one of my favorite ones and this is a collaboration between fender and boss to get some of those classical fender reverb sounds and also one of my favorites is the true spring by my friends over at source audio who have done an excellent job at recreating an algorithm that totally nails those vintage fender spring tanks now even with all these great pedals out there putting them in the wrong place can really ill affect the sound that you're going for especially if you're trying to emulate that gold standard of the kind of black panel black face era mid 60's fender amplifiers now typically when we see people putting reverb pedals on their board they're typically using them last and they're using them right into the input of their clean amplifier especially if they're using a clean amp platform that's going to somewhat emulate maybe the clean platform of a fender with maybe limited sorts of effects so no tremolo no on-board reverb and using the reverb pedal on the pedal board in order to create the reverb sound that would ordinarily be in the amp now an interesting thing is if we look at the classic fender amplifiers and the reverb circuit that's inside of them if we were to sort of pull apart that signal path we would see that the reverb is actually between the preamp and the power amp so in other words guitar goes into the input of the amp it goes through the preamp section of the fender amplifier then it goes to the reverb and then it goes to the power amp section so usually if we're running a reverb pedal we're actually running the reverb in front of the preamp which is actually the wrong place to run it based on the traditional signal path of the fender amplifier in actuality if you would want to run a reverb pedal in the exact same location as it would be in a fender amp you would have to have an amp that actually had an effects loop in order to be able to bring in that reverb pedal between the preamp and the power amp which is basically what an effects loop is it's like an insert point that allows you to send out from the preamp and then return back into the power amp so that you can insert pedals in that location and putting it in front of a traditional fender reverb is just not the same signal path as what you would see if you're actually utilizing the reverb inside of a classical fender amplifier this would be the same thing whether you're using the fender reverb tanks again this is sort of an idea that would allow people to take maybe some of the vintage tweed style fender amplifiers or even some of the early 60s blonde style fender amplifiers and be able to incorporate spring reverb but most of those spring reverb and external boxes that fender created predated their actual implementation of reverb inside of the amplifiers and so they were using it in front of the preamp but in actual implementation when they actually put it inside of the amps they weren't doing it the same way as the signal path that you would find with the ordinary tube reverb from the early 60s like the 63 classic fender reverb tank so how does this apply to pedals if you have one of the boss digital reverb pedals like i suggest or one of the actual ones that have a spring in it like the surfy bear or the ones from crazy tube circuits or even the ones that were being made by van amps back in the day what would you do with those if you wanted to actually make it sound exactly like a fender reverb well you'd have to put it in the effects loop of an amplifier and if your amp didn't have an effects loop then this is going to be a challenge for you to be able to incorporate there's a couple work around solutions that you could use in a wet dry context you're going to take a line out from the actual amplifier itself you can send it into those pedals and be able to then return those pedals into some sort of power amp you could either use amplifiers that have effects loops for that or you could use my suggestion which is taking a cab zeus from our friends over at gfi and returning the reverb into that and then that creates kind of a balanced output that does some speaker and cabinet simulation that you can send back to the front of house and then get your reverb from there again kind of using it in more of a wet dry context the other way you could do it is sort of not in the style that it would be in an original fender amp which would be using it in front of the amplifier which is typically how we see most people doing it when they're running pedal board setups and although that can sound pretty good it's actually not exactly the same so i want to show you what i actually mean by that so i'm going to show you the sound of my classic fender blackface 1964 deluxe reverb you can hear the reverb on that and then i'm going to use my digital fender reverb pedal to try to recreate some of those sounds you'll see because it's not in the same location it's not going to sound quite as good i'm then going to go line out of my amplifier and put that same reverb pedal after the line out so that's after the preamp and i'm going to run that into a gfi cab zeus and then that's going to feed the front of house and in this case it's going to be my apollo and then i'm going to get the reverb there and then i'm going to mix it back in in parallel and see how those sounds maybe differ and where one might sound more accurate to the original fender amplifier itself and the reverb that's built in [Music] so [Music] do so i think you can hear there that we definitely get much closer using the line out option now this is a lot more difficult it requires that you have a line out box in this case i'm using a custom one made by custom audio electronics but also sir and bray make excellent ones that are also available brand new or on reverb that you can go and check out i'll put some links to those below if you're curious about where to get a line out box equally the cab zeus does a really great job of kind of creating a digital representation of a kind of a linear power amp sound with a mic speaker which would emulate what would happen if i was just taking the tube reverb and driving it into the return of another power amp but i'm able to do that all digitally in a much more compact way so that i can just get it right into my apollo and this would be great if you're on stage you could either hear it in your in-ears or you could designate that reverb to wedges that can be mixed in parallel with the dry sound now let's talk a little bit less about the tube base reverbs and get really into more of the digital reverbs and also how we incorporate those with delays a lot of people typically as i've said before when they use pedal boards and they're running delays and reverbs in front of the amp a lot of them typically will put the reverb last because they believe in terms of the signal path of an ordinary fender amplifier that reverb and tremolo would be last but they're not taking into account the fact that the reverb is actually not in front of the preamp but it's after the preamp and before the power amp so i think we've already sort of dissolved the idea that you can perfectly emulate the signal path of a fender amp by putting reverb last but one cool thing that i've seen in studio context and also in a lot of the classical rack rigs from the 80s and 90s is where they've placed reverb in relationship to delay to get some really cool tones now in an ordinary studio type sound you're generally going to be running your delay and reverb in parallel in most mix buses you have 100 wet effects that's including the reverb and delay and those are both in parallel so it's basically like they're getting the same exact independent guitar signal off the guitar and then those are getting mixed back in with the dry signal so the order is no longer such an important thing because those two items are mixed in parallel and they're not serial effects like they are on ordinary pedals so in the context of a studio situation running in parallel you actually don't really have to worry so much about the interaction of delay and reverb and the reverb can be mixed independently again acoustically with the dry sound however it is that you want it and you can get some really cool sounds this is also the way that wet dry wet rigs are run and if i wanted to try this out and actually experiment with running a parallel path i could use a music comlab parallelizer to put my delay and reverb inside of it has a dry mix and you'd want to make sure that the delay and reverb pedals that you incorporate into this are capable of going 100 wet or kill dry and are in those modes so that when you're mixing in the dry signal you're not competing with the existing dry signal and those two possible effects i'm going to show you some cool ways that i've done that using my axe effects and i'm setting this up for kind of a classical 2290 type sound and a pcm era reverb that you would find out of some of those classical studio rack reverbs [Music] dude [Music] [Music] so [Music] that absolutely sounded great i think for the studio context and trying to get really big kind of kind of nice beautiful cleans this is certainly a great way to do it and the way i was achieving that sound is taking my deluxe reverb as my dry then i was taking a line out of that feeding that into the axe effects having those effects mixed 100 wet with the mixer all internal on the ax effects and then that feeds my daw and then i'm miking my deluxe reverb and that's going into another channel in the apollo again and then feeding the daw so my dry channel is just the deluxe reverb on its own mic and then my wet left is the axe effects feeding one channel of the apollo and then the wet right again is my axe effects again feeding that apollo and then the daw but what if you don't have a parallel mixer what if you don't want to have all these effects in parallel or you don't have the space or the time or the patience to do that and you want to run your serial effects and have all the benefits of kind of getting something in some semblance of this studio type tone you can start reordering in fact your delay in reverb to get some really interesting sounds in a lot of the classical robert bradshaw rigs whether we're talking about what he did for van halen or what he was doing for guys like michael landau or steve lukather in almost all those rigs even though he was running delays and reverbs in parallel he was putting them in separate mixes so that he could feed one into the other and i really like this technique where he will use reverb in the first mix that feeds in series another parallel mix with delays and this would allow you to have a reverb on every delay trail instead of the reverb trailing off before the delay was completed this can be a really cool sound because you can have that beautiful reverb whatever way you've set that up whether it's a shimmer or modulated reverb or just a simple plate or a hall that occurs and is printed on every single repeat of the delay because generally our delay repeats are longer than our reverb decay so this allows you to have some really cool effects that may not be something that you would necessarily hear in nature but is very very cool in the way that it sounds and it decays and gives you all the benefits of the reverb on every single note that's repeated so what i'm going to do there to demonstrate this is i'm going to show you first what happens if i'm running delay and reaper in an ordinary sense that i see most pedal board users doing where they go delay into reverb and then we're going to leave the exact same settings that we had and we're going to reverse them we're going to put the reverb first and then the delay to sort of emulate the way that you would see guys like robert bradshaw feed two parallel mixes into each other with the reverb being closer to the guitar and then the delay being further from the guitar so you can get all those reverb trails on the delay so let's check out those two ways and compare them side by side [Music] so i think you can see there that maybe it's not so much a better worse type thing it's really just a preference do you like the way that it sounds when you get all those reverbs on each repeat of the delay or do you like the reverb to kind of naturally roll off now if you're thinking about this in terms of the acoustical properties and maybe the physics of how the interaction of delay and reverb might work say if you're yelling into a cave you'll typically get a fast repeat based on whatever the reflection is that first happens and then you're getting reverb afterwards and that signal path in terms of yelling into a cave would sort of be something like having a single repeat with the delay first and then the reverb happening after and again typically there's a little bit more of a gap or a delay between the time of that first delay and then when the reverb starts to happen this would be different in an outdoor sort of environment say if you were yelling into the grand canyon you don't really have so much reverberation but you do have some delays that are occurring there and they'll come back to you at different speeds depending on where the reflections are so you might get one that's coming at 20 milliseconds the next one at 70 milliseconds the next one at 10 milliseconds depending on what things are bouncing off of so again thinking about the acoustical properties in the relationship of delay and reverb i would think about that in the order that we actually see most pedalboard users putting the delays and reverbs where they would put delay first and then reverb however having some cool ways to be able to manipulate that for the studio and certainly how we've seen it used on a lot of pop music by way of the robert bradshaw systems that were absolutely essential in 80s and 90s pop music you would almost always invariably see the reverb in the first mix feeding in series to a second mix with delay so that was our overview on reverb pedals positions to put them the way that you might find reverb used in nature and some different ways that you might like to experiment with using reverb pedals in order to be able to create different sounds again everything that we used today and that we talked about today is all linked in the description whether we're talking about different sorts of spring reverbs and pedal formats or in the kind of the original enclosure formats if it's a replica of say a fender or one of the fender units itself that does reverb or if we're talking about digital versions like the true spring or the original boss fender collaboration to create a digital version of the reverb tank also there's some amazing digital reverbs out there two of my favorites one of which i used today was the rv7 from hardwire has a lexicon chip in there absolutely sounds incredible another one that i love that's sort of the next version of this is called the polara that's made by digitech absolutely wonderful petal very much a sleeper and sounds amazing for those classical 80s vintage style rack tones also if you want a swiss army knife of course nothing beats what strymon is doing the big sky is an absolutely amazing unit if you need something that does a ton of different reverbs there's certainly nothing better than that but all in all i love to have simplified reverb stuff that kind of does one thing really excellent and then i'm able to use that and incorporate that into my rig the way that i want i hope you understood a little bit better about how to incorporate signal path and how to maybe mix up the orders of the delay in the reverb to get different sounds maybe more of a studio type sound instead of kind of more of a classical way that you might put reverb and delay in series also how it might occur in nature if you wanted to kind of match that up to the physics of say yelling into a cave and how the reverb and delay might interact i hope you found this useful and if you did i really appreciate it if you give us a thumbs up give us a comment tell us one of the things that maybe you learned from this video or maybe some of the shortcomings things that we could improve upon or create another video from this if you want to support us further you can always check out what we're doing over on vertexfx.com where we sell all of our guitar pedals or therigdr.com where we have all of our pedal boards pedalboard supplies cables patch cables zip ties tie down mounts anything that you could possibly want in addition to tone consulting if you're interested in taking a one-on-one zoom meeting with me we have all those options available there also if you want a free way to continue to interact with us we have long-form conversations over on our podcast which is available on spotify itunes and all the big podcatchers out there so definitely do check that out if you haven't already so until next time i'm mason marangella aka the rig doctor thank you so much for watching i hope you learned a little something about reverb we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 104,148

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, guitar effects, guitar gear, guitar pedals, reverb pedals, spring reverb, analog reverb pedals, pedal order, pedalboard tips, the best reverb pedals, reverb before or after delay?, You're using your reverb incorrectly, strymon bigsky, polara reverb, guitar pedalboard facts, electric guitar tips, effects pedals, how to get big reverb sounds, the best reverb tones, how pros use reverb, studio reverb, reverb

Id: gC7WSM7h44I

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021