What You Don't Know About Reverb - Reverb Masterclass

welcome back to the channel today it's all about reverb and we're going to be looking at and listening to lots of different types of reverbs and the aim here is to learn a little bit about them but also decide which ones might be best for certain situations in a mix these are all artificial reverbs some of which are trying to recreate the sound of a real space and others are simply for the sake of an effect to create some extra dimension and space we don't often get the chance or have the ability to actually record in lovely sort of reverberant spaces and it often doesn't offer as much control either so most recordings in a typical recording studio end up sounding quite dry and very controlled often because there's a lot of acoustic treatment on the walls just like i've got right now and this is great it gives us a lot of control but it often sounds very dry and very close it doesn't sound open and natural like a real space would so all of these artificial reverbs are designed to combat that and sort of open up a recording a little bit more add a little bit more of that space and dimension that we want to hear so let's waste no time and just get right into it the first artificial reverbs were created in the 1930s and 40s using echo chambers but they're still very popular to this day an engineer would send signal from the mixing console to a specially designed echo chamber the dry recording would be played through the speakers bounce off the walls and then be picked up by a microphone or a series of microphones these chambers were built in all sorts of shapes and sizes sometimes with tiled walls or smooth painted walls to aid the reflections in these audio examples you should be able to very clearly hear the sound of this chamber [Music] chambers offer a very bold and obvious reverb effect and although they can have a very lush decay tail they often don't wash out the original signal too much they don't sound very balanced so they can often benefit from further filtering and eq but it's this unbalanced character and tone that you've likely heard all over records from the 50s and 60s of course not every studio could build their own dedicated echo chamber and in 1957 emt came up with a solution called the emt 140 plate reverb it weighs almost a quarter of a ton and it's a large wooden box but it's better than building a separate room so how does this create reverb well in that box hangs a large metal sheet and onto that we fix a transducer which simply converts the electrical signal into vibrations the sheet vibrates and then on either side of the plate we have output transducers or pickups much like you have on a guitar and these change those vibrations into the plate back into electrical signal plates sound very bright and smooth like this and although these don't sound like a natural space they're wonderful on vocals and instruments [Music] they also feature controls to change the length of the decay to blend between the dry and the white signal and often change the width of the reverb as well [Music] a popular technique is to increase the decay time to the maximum and then pull the blend all the way down so that there's just a small amount of reverb all the time just shimmering underneath either the vocal or the guitar [Music] [Music] unfortunately it's very easy to wash out a sound with this reverb as you can hear i've done a little bit too much but if you use this on vocals guitars or even percussion especially snare drums it can add a lot of brightness and just a little bit extra presence as long as you don't push the wet amount up too much and completely wash out that original recording [Music] to summarize plate reverbs are bright and smooth which makes them excellent for adding presence to instruments and vocals and many plugins allow you to extend the decay times much further than was possible with the hardware but i would say less is often more with plate reverb and this takes us right onto the spring reverb which is similar to the plate but this time uses springs attached to the transducers and these are housed within a much smaller tank or canister these have a very distinctive transient behavior take a listen whenever the springs have to deal with a fast transient they give off this spiraling ping sound which means that on drums they sound a bit ridiculous so it's more commonly used on electric guitar whenever there's plucked notes or your hand slaps the strings it actually enhances the groove take a listen [Music] so a quick recap spring reverbs have that unique transient behavior that spiraling decayed ping and this often is used to enhance groove and rhythm on guitar tracks but it also adds a subtle presence and dimension to anything you put it on but again it doesn't sound like a real room but things started rapidly changing from the 1970s onward with the advent of the digital or algorithmic reverb some of the most famous units being the lexicon 224 and the emt250 and although both of those are hardware i'm also including all recent digital reverbs and the plugins which you'll find in your daw because most of them function on a similar principle and this is to use many stacked repeated and cascading delay and decay tails from the same original source to try and create the illusion of depth and space [Music] these processors also stack up dozens of different effects which allow you to further modify and modulate that reverb and this includes the ability to modify the early reflections of the reverb which are the first reflections you would hear if you were in a natural space if i remove the early reflections becomes harder to hear the shape and size of the room [Music] and when i add this back in you can more easily hear the shape of the room and not just those lush late reflections that make up the main body of the reverb [Music] at first we were simply creating a room reverb now rooms are not particularly balanced but they do add a lot of liveliness back to an instrument and they sound pretty natural however as we push the decay up we ended up with a hall reverb which does sound a lot more balanced let's take a listen on a cello [Music] unlike a room reverb a hall is designed with acoustics in mind so you can hear how the cello reverberation sounds very balanced and natural it's not the sound you're going to want in every mix situation but on a beautiful acoustic instrument like this a subtle amount of whole reverb can sound just lovely and onto something quite fun now algorithmic reverbs also offer the ability to create reverse reverbs and other effects that are not possible in the natural space let's take a listen [Music] and this is where categorizing reverbs becomes a little bit difficult because the modern digital and algorithmic processors allow you to create all sorts of ambiences that simply couldn't be created in the natural world although the algorithms vary between different processors a few things they have in common is that they offer almost perfect emulations of real spaces and devices they're highly adjustable and usually filled with many more effects and the modern plugins have relatively low cpu and ram requirements so you can run multiple different types of reverb in one project and finally on to my favorite type of digital reverb which is the convolution reverb these use impulse responses to capture the sound of a space or device these capture the sound of that space by playing a short impulse response in that space or running that response into a device and then listening to and capturing the result with a microphone so let's listen to what that short click sounds like in a few different spaces and although these impulse responses or irs are not at all pleasant to listen to when the processor combines these with the original recording you end up with a perfect recreation of that space or reverb device and another benefit is that there are thousands of irs available many people record their own vintage hardware or record these impulse responses in beautiful spaces and share them for free and all you have to do is load up that impulse response in your chosen plugin however one potential downside is that they often require a little bit more cpu and much more memory and ram because you do need somewhere to store all of those impulse responses but i know that for some people this isn't a problem and storage and processing power is just becoming better and better by the year so that's everything for this video but if you want to learn more please do check out my other videos on eq and compression where i do a very similar thing i show all the different styles of processing available so thank you very much for watching and i'll see in the next one bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 289,660

Keywords: Reverb, Mixing with reverb, reverb explained, Chamber, Plate, Spring, Hall, Room, Convolution, what is, what is reverb, emt140, emt 250, lexicon 224, chamber reverb, which reverb, mixing, mastering, in the mix, music production, best reverb, reverb mastering, vocal reverb, guitar reverb

Id: YA4rZgq0RaI

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021