Home > Reverb

1 Introduction

Reverb effects basically create the ambience of a certain room - this can reach from small boxes to big churches. Most reverb effects also add more stereo atmosphere to your sounds: its in the nature of any room - which is what a reverb simulates - that the reverberation echoes back to you from all sides of the room.

Simply put, Reverbs are created by a series of many delays that take into account the dampening effects and diffusion of a room. See delay effects. Effects like reverb, chorus, flanger, phaser, and delay are classified as time-based processors.

2 The different Types

Plate Reverb

Electromechanical reverb in use since the 1940s. Consists of a huge suspended plate of (usually) thin steel, with an inductor and pickup.

Spring Reverb

The thing with the springs. Y'know?

Digital Reverb

All the VST and some of the Hardware stuff.

Impulse Reverb

e.g. SIR. Emagic Space Designer; "Impulse Response" recordings are taken of a reverb's response to a given signal and are re-synthesized using that recording. Still digital, but a very specific kind.

3 Controls

On a Reverb unit, be it hardware or software, you will a sort of controls like these:

Room Size

How large the room that is simulated will be

Decay Rate

How long the reverberation will last

Lowcut & Highcut

those limit the upper and lower frequencies that are taken into account for the actual reverb sound (very low & very high frequencies sound rather unnatural when reverberated)

Pre-Delay

amount of time before the reverberated sound starts

Early reflections (ER)

short echoes before the actual reverberation starts

Diffusion

think of it as how many diagons the simulated room will have; the more diffusion, the more muffled is the reverb

Dampening

how much of the reverb sound is swallowed by the simulated rooms walls, furniture, etc. - this is often given in Hertz, a natural sounding reverb will usually have the dampening at 5kHz.

Bell frequency

the room may have a "resonance frequency" that is especially loud when reverberating

Bell amount

the intensity of the Bell frequency

Dry out & Wet out

the balance between the original signal vs. the reverberated sound

4 Buzz Reverb effects

Buzz has quality freeware reverbs! Explore them :)

• HD HALYverb - has a built-in simple EQ & gate
• Jeskola Freeverb++ - based on the public "Freeverb" source (hard-coded into Buzz)
• Jeskola "Raverb" - a classic Buzz reverb
• LarsHa Funkyverb - nice sounding Reverb by Lars "Protracker" Hamre
• Sonic Verb - adaptation of the Sonic Timeworks 4080L direct-x reverb by SurfSmurf & Sonic Timeworks

On a related topic...
Also Rymix's Stereobox Pro is a VERY powerful plugin for introducing/taking away/placing stereo-spread

5 Reverb Usage Examples

Gated reverb

one connection from snare leads direcly into the master, another one goes into a wet only and very loud & long reverb. The reverberated signal then goes into a gate that closes very "early", cutting off the long reverb tail, leaving a short, almost constant snare sound (sound example here). Gated reverb is often used to make big 80s drums.

Reverb for vocals

a common trick to help keeping the sung words understandable is to use a really big pre-delay.

Using different reverbs to achieve different distances in the acoustic room

near: short reverb with lotsa early reflections
far: long damped reverb

Thickening up a kick with reverb

Putting a short timed reverb that has been LP filtered down bass levels (say 200Hz or less) can make your kicks a little more flabbier. Add compression or gating to suit and watch your stereo image - you still want to retain a lot of "mono" in your kick drums.

Saturation / Waveshaping / Distortion before reverbs

adding any of these effects will generally yield a more coloured sound from a reverb. Also helps in gaining more presence from a gate reverb, cheesy 80s style.

Degraded and downsampled reverb

sick of your reverb sounding so darn clean? crusty it up with some downsampling and bit shortening effects - 12 bit @ 22025 can sound great on drums!

Reverse Reverb

this can be achieved by recording your 100% wet signal and reversing the waveform. It is often used as intros to vocal parts.

The "Demon Effect"

furthermore on reverse reverb: reverse your entire vocal sample... apply reverb to it (so that it's in the actual wav file)... and reverse the vocal sample with the reverb on it back to normal. Now every word will have reverb leading up to it, which creates a somewhat spooky ghost-like sound.

Bounce-back Reverb

this can be acheived by setting a very fast decay time, and setting the predelay to seperate the wet signal from the dry signal, sounding as if the reverb is bouncing back.

True room reverb (re-amping)

Playing a track into a room and re-recording it can be great to add real reverb to your tracks. Variable speed techniques can change the timing and frequency response: For example, play the track twice as fast, record and then slow back down to increase the reverb time by twice as much (reduces fidelity, but still a load of fun!)

Building a reverb from a bunch of delays: a whole matrix of ninja delays is a good place to start, set to ms or samples rather than ticks.

Mono Reverb

yes, reverb doesn't always have to add a stereo atmosphere to your sound. Sometimes, you may want to have a mono reverb because there's already enough junk going on in the stereo panorama. This can be acheived by plugging your reverb into a Joachim Multi1 machine and setting the stereo width to 0.