Ask A Sound Guy

Big Red Button – Real Life Reverb

February 25th, 2009 | Author: Sanjay

Big Red Button is our weekly recording advice column. Check it out every Wednesday for tips on all things recording.

We all love those fancy reverbs, with great sounds that make vocals and drums trail on forever. Every DAW has at least one reverb plugin and I’m sure we’re all familiar with a host of classic sounds: rooms, halls, plates, echos, etc.

But not many of us have ever had the chance to work with the roots of reverb effects processing. Old studios had large rooms built and dedicated to being reverberation chambers. Reflective surfaces, acoustic treatments, and various other techniques created the unique, real reverb sounds you here on some old records.

The rooms would be equipped with a dedicated speaker and microphone to create and capture reverbs. The Speakers were often wired to auxiliary outputs on the studio’s mixer, and the mic would come back to a dedicated input. All the engineer had to do was turn up the send to the speaker and some of the most incredible reverbs you’ve ever heard were at their fingertips.

Now this is kind of an extravagant, expensive setup, but a lot of mid-range and small studios came up with a really affordable compromise. They used stairwells, bathrooms, closets – any extra room that you could get people out of when you needed it. Most of the time, the more reflective the better – so hard wood and tiled rooms were the prime candidates. All you had to do was setup your speaker and microphone in these rooms, check to make sure no one was walking around in them (or using the toilet) and start blasting away to make your reverbs.

So What?

Well, for all of us home recordists, I’ve got a great secret to reveal to you. We’ve all got our very own personal and unique reverb chamber, right in our homes. I’ll give you a hint… ever sang in shower?

I’ll walk you through an example using my own bathroom.

1) Make sure all roommates/significant others/spouses are made aware that you’re repurposing thing bathroom for important business. Remove any floor rugs are huge absorbent materials like a a big rack of towels from the room. The point is to keep the room really live.

2) Grab any old P.A. speaker, guitar amp, keyboard amp, anything you can play sound through at a pretty good level. I’ve even done this with a small TV to get a really strange filtered voice sound. Set it up in your bathroom, hopefully facing at least a foot away from some reflective stuff.

Amp facing the toilet to get some funky irregular reflections going.

I set up my old practice amp my parents bought from Costco when I was in high school (always keep a little old amp around, they’re incredible useful). I really wanted to avoid a bunch of bass bouncing around, so I used the amp’s Eq to roll back the bass and swept the high mids up a bit.

3) Setup a mic not necessarily facing directly into the amp. I’m going to use a cheapie small capsule condenser because its naturally tuned to more gritty high end, which is what I want.

Setting up the Mic facing into the shower, and away from the amp.

You can see I setup the mic to point into the shower. (I pulled the curtains back to cut down on absorption. The reason I’m avoiding facing into the amp directly is that I’m purposely trying to get a reverby, delayed sound. I don’t want a ton of dry signal on my recording. This is important to note, because Where you set up the mic and amp really determines your wet/dry mix on your recording. most plugins give you knobs to do this, but in this setup, it’s all about placement.

My rough idea with this setup is to get the amp to play sound at the toilet and have sound reflect into the shower where the mic picks it up. I’m hoping the sound travels in all sorts of funky paths along the way.

4) Now you’re ready to start setting up your Session. Plug your mic into an input on your interface, and run a guitar cable from an extra output on your interface to the amp.

Setting up your Session.

In this picture I’ve setup my session to have two audio tracks. The first contains the drum sounds I want to add reverb to. I’ve created a send on the track and sent it to the output on my interface that is patched to the amp.

The second track is the one that I’m recording to. I set it’s input to the mic in my shower and record enable it. I’m working with a small interface with one on set of ins and outs, so I’m going to have to be careful with muting things to avoid feedback. Just make sure not to allow the mic’s incoming signal to be played through the amp. That basically the only path you might create a feedback loop with.

5) You’re finally ready to try this out. I setup my first track to loop playback on the drum hits while I get levels on the amp. I turn up the send in the session and go to the amp to slowly turn it up. Tweak the level and an Eq so that it sounds good when you’re standing close to the MIC, not the amp. This is key, because you’re not trying to get a cool amped sound (although that a fun technique too), you’re shooting for reverby sound.

6) Now close your bathroom door and while it’s still playing back, start to monitor your mic and turn it up. You should be hearing some funky reverb stuff going on.

7) If you like what you hear, line up your transport to the beginning of where you want to record and hit that big red button.

Congratulations, you’ve just added REAL reverb to your track. All you have to do now on mix down is set the two levels in your tracks to give you that wet/dry blend.

Here’s some samples from my setup. The first is single drum hits, and the second is a drum pattern. In each, you’ll hear the dry hits, the reverb hits, and then the two blended together.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Extra stuff:

One thing I find is that the reverb track is often delayed a bit from the original. This can be good if you like the sound of it, but it can create a kind of slap-back delay if it’s timed long enough. To fix this, all you have to do is zoom into the track like this.

Zoom in on your tracks to see time difference.

The bottom, green track is my reverb recording and you can see I’ve made a cut to the region where the recording starts. Just delete the extra time. and line the regions back up to look like this.