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Psycoacoustics of Reverb
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Natural reverb is so much a part of our everyday lives that we just take Forgotten your
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spectacularly long reverb time. A good quality electronic reverb unit
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music, but in pop music we don't always want the end result to be a
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simple imitation of nature. It stands to reason that if we take natural Login here
reverb for granted, then we'll do the same with the reverb added to
recorded music. What I intend to explore here are ways in which simple
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reverb can be modified to make it more attention-grabbing in the
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SOS SOUND ADVICE Tips Any good stereo reverb will create a sense of stereo width, and even March 2006
front-to-back perspective, but the human hearing system will very soon On sale now at main
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decide that the effect isn't really important if it isn't changing. Our
explained bookstores (or buy
hearing systems are far more likely to lock onto change, because
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to get your undivided attention than more subtle changes, although
something like a sudden silence where there was previously
background noise, can also warn of possible dangers. Working on
these principles, it follows that if we can add changes to the expected
reverb character, the listener's attention is more likely to be grabbed.

Perhaps the most obvious conclusion you can draw from this is that
reverb will be more effective if it's only used in parts of a mix, and not
all the way through. Basic space-creating reverb probably will be used
all the way through a mix, but the occasional use of massive or unusual
reverb settings can help create the required interest. Click image for Contents

Other recent issues:

GATED EFFECTS February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
Probably the simplest form of change you can add to reverb is to call November 2005
up a gated setting. This has no natural counterpart, so the abrupt October 2005
cessation of reverb at the end of the gate period attracts attention.
Getting a gated reverb sound is usually just a matter of calling up a
suitable preset or creating your own patch using the editing parameters
in your effects, but it can help to keep in mind how the effect was
originally engineered.
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PAUL WHITE Books
The gated effect was first applied to drums, and involved putting up
ambience mics in a very live room to capture the reverb sound. These
mics were then fed through a conventional stereo gate, which was

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CANYONS OF THE MIND Page 2 of 4

externally keyed from the close mics on the drum kit. Setting a hold
time of half a second or so, followed by a fast release time, causes the
gate to allow only the first half second of reverb to pass though after
each drum hit, before closing again. Figure 1 shows how gated drums
can be created using the traditional method. A compressor was often Screenshots too
used to maintain the level of the reverb, and this is shown in the small? Click on photos,
illustration. The result is the gated drum sound that has become screenshots and
something of a cliché, though the effect doesn't have to become stale if diagrams in articles (after
you use it sparingly. August 2003 issue) to
open a Larger View
window for detailed
Gated drums still work better in a dance than a rock context, and you'll viewing/printing.
find that the more reverb you add, the more powerful the drum sound
appears to get. If you want to be less obvious, use the gated effect on
just part of the drum/percussion mix -- perhaps just on the handclaps or
additional percussion. Gated effects also work particularly well on
industrial, metallic sounds, making them sound more aggressive.

Less obvious applications for gated reverb include treating electric

guitars, to create a 'small club' effect. Perhaps the best attribute of
gated reverb is that it manages to make its presence felt without filling
up all the spaces between notes or beats. Because plenty of contrast is
retained between the beats and the spaces between them, the sense of
loudness is exaggerated by the effect, whereas most reverb has the
effect of diminishing the sense of loudness.

The reverse reverb effect found in most multi-effects processors is also

closely related to gated reverb, the main difference being the envelope
of the reverb reflections. Instead of starting off loud and then being cut
off sharply, as in the case of gated reverb, the reverb level builds up
from zero over a period of a second or so, then stops abruptly -- as
illustrated in Figure 2. This is exactly the opposite of the envelope you'd
expect a natural reverb to have, so it sounds rather like a tape being
played backwards, even though nothing is actually being reversed.

The traditional way to create true reverse reverb (as opposed to this
kind of off-the-shelf fake), is to record the track to be processed onto an
analogue multitrack, thread the tape in reverse so it plays backwards,
then use the reversed track to drive a conventionally set reverb unit.
The reverb output is recorded onto a spare tape track, so that when the
tape is once again threaded the right way round, the reverb is truly
reversed, to the extent that it even starts to build up before the sound
that created it. This effect has been used to create such things as
demonic voices in films, but it's also quite a nice musical effect if used
carefully. Try it on voice, single chords or stabs, and cymbal crashes.

MOVEMENT
One easy way to create a sense of movement without having to
actually pan anything is to set up two different reverbs, one for the right
channel and the other for the left. At its most basic, this could involve
using two similar reverbs, then adding a second or so of pre-delay to
one side only, so that the reverb appears to start in one channel, then
moves over to the other as it decays. If you don't have two reverbs, you
can get the same effect by putting one of the outputs of a stereo reverb
through a delay unit set to give around a second of delay with no
feedback.

Another nice 'movement' dodge is to use a reverse-type reverb in the

left channel, and a conventional reverb in the right. If you can match the
two effects so the reversed sound reaches maximum just as the other
channel decays to nothing, you get something similar to a gated reverb,
but with left/right movement thrown in. Figure 3 shows how the reverb
envelopes might look.

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CANYONS OF THE MIND Page 3 of 4

Of course, the most direct way to get movement is to physically move

the reverb from left to right using an autopanner. Most multi-effects
units now include a panning facility, and if you set the pan rate to a
multiple of the song tempo, you'll find the effect adds movement without
interfering with the rhythm of your music. If you have an effects unit that
can give you panning sync'ed to MIDI clock, then you can have
precision panning. Whereas normal panning can be gimmicky, just
panning the reverb (or other effects) and leaving the dry sound in one
place is far more subtle -- but still busy enough to be interesting.

AND FINALLY
I could go on forever about the use of effects, especially reverb, but I'm
going to finish off with a few short and useful tips.

• If you find a reverb patch is making a vocal appear sibilant, edit the
patch so that it has more high frequency damping. You may need to
bring the HF damping right down to 3kHz, or even less, to clean up the
sound.

• During post-production (a polite name for salvage), you may

sometimes have to add reverb to a track that's already been mixed, in
which case the bass instruments will probably get overtreated and
become muddy-sounding. You can get around this by putting an
equaliser before the reverb input, to cut off anything below 150Hz or
thereabouts. The side chain filters of a Drawmer DS201 gate work
particularly well for this -- just put the gate in Key Listen mode and use
the filters as equalisers.

• To add interest to an otherwise static-sounding reverb, try feeding the

effect send though a chorus or flange effect, before feeding it into the
reverb input as shown in Figure 4. The modulation of the chorus/flange
effect will add movement and interest to the reverb patch, but leave the
original sound untouched, so that you don't end up with a gimmicky
result. This effect is great for all kinds of music, from pop ballads to new
age.

• For more radical musical styles, try heavily effecting the sound before
it is fed into the reverb. You could use a pitch shifter, for example, to
push the reverb feed up or down by an octave, or even a musical fifth.
You could use a distortion box to chew up the signal before you add
reverb, or even set up a multitap delay with loads of feedback, so that
all the individual delays get transformed into their own little cloud of
reverb. There's no limit to what you can try, and although some of what
you come up with is likely to be unusable, the occasional gem will
emerge.

• If you feel a sound needs more reverb, but adding more makes the
mix sound messy, consider increasing the reverb level but shortening
the reverb decay time. This increases the sense of the sound being in a
real space, without flooding everything in a wash of reverb. You can
also roll off some bottom end from the reverb return, or increase the
low frequency damping, providing this doesn't make the reverb sound
too cold.

• Lastly, you may have an old reverb which you feel sounds unnatural
by today's standards. Don't bin it, because some of those trashy old
sounds are great in a creative context. The old Alesis XTc is now
something of a collectors item because of its wonderfully gritty
character, and early Yamaha reverbs have a nice industrial edge to
them. Don't judge everything by how natural it sounds; look what
happened to the Roland TR909. Failing miserably in its attempts to
emulate the sound of a real drum kit, it sank without trace when first
released in 1984. People today prize the sounds for what they are, not

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CANYONS OF THE MIND Page 4 of 4

for what they once tried to be, and a good example can fetch up to
£900 on the second-hand market.

FASCINATING RHYTHM
Normally, reverb is added to a dry signal, but you can create interesting
effects by muting the entire dry signal and using just the reverbed
signal. This can work nicely on certain types of backing vocal where
you want a disembodied, distant effect, and in new age music, you can
create seriously washy synth pads by using just the reverb output for
certain sounds.

The next step is to crank up the reverb time to several seconds, then
use a key-triggered gate to change the envelope of the gate. This is
similar to the gated reverb setup, but instead of simply chopping off the
reverb after half a second or so, you can feed a rhythmic sound into the
gate's trigger input, to switch the reverb on and off.

A percussive sound from a drum machine can be used to force the

reverb to 'play' the same rhythm as the percussive instrument. The
length of the reverb notes can be changed by varying the hold and
decay time of the gate, as shown in the accompanying diagram. By
feeding the outputs of the reverb to two gates and panning the outputs
left and right, two different rhythmic trigger inputs can be used to create
counter-rhythms that appear from the left and right channels. How well
this works depends largely on what signal is being fed into the reverb
unit in the first place, but harmonically rich sounds such as gritty synth
pads or distorted guitars work well.

Published in SOS June 1996

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