20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |

LOG IN REGISTER SUBSCRIBE SHOP HELP 0 items Search

SOUND ON SOUND

NEWS FORUM MAGAZINE REVIEWS TECHNIQUES PEOPLE SOUND ADVICE MUSIC BUSINESS

HOME > TECHNIQUES >

In this article...

Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 Real Or Fake?

Ambience With Everything
How top engineers use their most important e ect Love The Leakage
Controlling Real Reverb
Recording
Further Reading: The Producer Interviews
By Mike Senior Published August 2008
Electrical Interventions
Following last month's introduction to reverb , we take you through the tips Howard Massey: Behind The Glass
and tricks of some of the world's best producers — many of whom are Recording With Arti cial Reverb
thinking about the reverb sound they want long before they get to the mix. Real Reverb At Mixdown
Analogue Reverb Simulators
"The ultimate feeling of a good record [is] Some Digital Classics
having various spaces that you feel you're in." Golden Oldies
How Much Reverb?
Whether or not you agree with Phil Ramone
How Many Reverbs?
here, there's no denying the importance of a
EQ & Pre-delay
sense of acoustic depth, and the reverb that
About The Author
primarily delivers it, in music production. Most
Mono Or Stereo?
articles on reverb, however, tend to deal simply
Automated Reverb
with applying digital reverbs at mixdown, but Room For Improvement
while this is clearly an important technique,
many of the most successful albums have
created their reverb sound by other means,
and sometimes without any arti cial reverb at Readers' Ads
all. So for this feature I've brought together the
techniques and opinions of more than 70 of VIEW ALL ADS CREATE FREE AD
the world's top engineers and producers, to try
to give a more wide-ranging and realistic view
of how reverb is used at all the di erent stages of the record-making process. On the same subject
Session Notes: Recording An Acoustic Guitar Duo
Real Or Fake? August 2018
Inside Track: BTS 'Fake Love'
One of the fundamental questions that every producer needs to answer is: at what stage is this August 2018
record going to acquire whatever reverb it needs? At one extreme you have this approach from Emile Haynie: Producing Florence + The Machine
Butch Vig: "[I'd] started getting more and more into recording everything very dry, and getting August 2018

away from ambient mics... Everything would be really in your face, and then if you wanted to Marta Salogni
August 2018
add reverb or echo later you could. You could put it farther back in the mix, but if we wanted
Tracking A Record In A Day with Vance Powell
something to be way up front in the mix you could also do that."
July 2018

Despite this obvious practical advantage of keeping recordings dry, most producers
acknowledge that natural reverb still has a lot to o er a Latest Videos
production in terms of a sense of realism and size, even in
these days of convolution processing. As a result, the
practice of recording additional ambient mics to separate
tracks during tracking has become widespread, because it
give a sort of 'best of both worlds' option — real reverb
over which you still have some separate control at
mixdown. And by far the most common context within
which ambient mics are mentioned is that of recording
drums — despite his comments above, even Butch Vig
admits being partial: "I will put ambient mics on the
drums, but I also like to have tight mics." PreSonus Faderport - Summer NAMM 2018
1 week 3 days ago.
Although the default drum ambience setup certainly
seems to be a stereo pair of some description, variations
are many and various. While recording the Pixies, for

[Link] 1/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
example, Gil Norton kept things simple with a single high The 'reverb' you hear on records is
sometimes the result of ambient miking
mic over the kit, and the band Athlete took a similar
techniques, rather than arti cial reverb.
approach. Going in the other direction, Joe Barresi, Dave Opening the doors of a studio and
Eringa, Eddie Kramer and Dave Tickle have all stated a placing ambient mics in hallways or
preference for a third mono mic in addition to the pair: "I adjacent spaces, as described by
love to use a combination of a stereo and a mono room producer Ben Hillier, seems to be a
mic," enthuses Barresi, "so nine out of 10 times I'll have popular technique.

three tracks of ambience." Chris Thomas, Bill Price and Ian Little go a step further, using two
ambient pairs in di erent positions, but Roy Thomas Baker leaves them all in the dust: "One set
of drums was set up in the Coach House live room, on top of the stage that the band [the Eventide Punctuate & Saturate - Summer NAMM 2018
Darkness] uses on the road. So the bass drum was halfway between the oor and the ceiling, 2 weeks 4 hours ago.
equidistant to all eight corners of the room, and we had ambient microphones in each of the
eight corners, plus close microphones and overhead mics. Typically we would use 36
microphones to record the drums, but we would have nearly double that amount set up."

Using ambient mics for drums may be old news for some readers, but the same kinds of
techniques also appear to be fairly common currency for other instruments too. Ken Nelson,
for instance, uses a separate ambient mic for acoustic guitar: "What I tend to do sometimes is
have something like a KM84 cardioid mic, and I'll have, say, a 414 set on gure-of-eight as a
room mic. That way you get a bit of the room sound." As I discussed in greater detail back in my
SOS August 2007 feature
([Link]/sos/aug07/articles/[Link]), electric guitars are
also routinely recorded with an additional room mic by luminaries such as Al Schmitt, Chris DigiAuxine inc Kaoline - Summer NAMM 2018
Tsangarides and Tony Visconti. "I always record [the room sound] if it's a real heavy rock guitar 2 weeks 1 day ago.
with power chords and crunches and all," remarks Visconti. "I'll go around the room and clap
my hands and I say, 'Put the mics there, that's it.' Quite often, I'll turn the room mic towards the
studio window, and I'll get a re ection of the guitar sound — not directly facing it, because
SIGN UP TO SOS NEWSLETTERS
you're looking for re ections."

Electronic instruments are by no means exempt, either. Both Gareth Jones and Joe Chiccarelli
have recorded ampli ed synths with ambient mics, while Andy Grassi adopted a similar ruse
for MPC-programmed tracks when working with Wyclef Jean — in his words, "I always want to
try to have things that actually move air on the tracks."

Ambience With Everything

For some projects, though, ambience is so important to the desired sonics that it makes sense
to leave several sets of room mics set up at all times, a time-saver that has been described by
both Roy Thomas Baker and Joe Chiccarelli. "[The White Stripes] work extremely quickly," said
Chiccarelli, "and expected me to be ready to record at any time, so I had several sets of room
ambience microphones set up in the studio. When they began to play a song, I could quickly
push up the faders and choose which microphones best suited the songs."

Even if you don't use it at all in the nal stereo

mix, recording an ambient mic during your
tracking sessions can pay dividends, as Tony
Visconti discovered when revisiting his
recordings for T Rex's Electric Warrior: "Back in
the '60s, my mentor Denny Cordell told me that
it would always be useful to keep an open mic
in the room, but I don't think he realised how
useful this would be in the year 2003 when
you're doing a 5.1 mix and you have an
ambient mic that gives you a kind of time
delay. It makes you go 'Aha, so this was the size
of the studio that the band was in.' You get John Leckie: "Di erent control rooms in di erent
more reality that way." studios will make the reverb sound di erent. For
instance, if you listen in a really small, dead control
Of course, if you're con dent that you can room, you tend to add more reverb than you need.
judge the ambience levels right while When you go to a more live mastering room, there
may suddenly be too much reverb... But the trend
recording, a quicker method of incorporating
now seems to be towards bigger, more live control
ambience into your recordings is simply to rooms, so we've got deader records."
move a single mic further away from the
source. Bob Bullock takes this tack with ddle players, for example ("You want the room, not
the rosin!"), while Ben Hillier and Alan Parsons apply the same principle to electric guitars. "I've
always thought that most people mic amps too closely," says Parsons. "They supposedly make
it up with an ambient mic, but I much prefer to nd a mic position that works and process that,
rather than mix in too much ambience."

[Link] 2/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
If you're going to go for the single-mic approach, though, you'd be wise to err on the dry side if
you're in any doubt. "The same thing applies as with compression," says Scott Kieklak. "You can
always put more ambience on later, but you can't take o what you've already recorded." The
way Johnny Dollar went about tting the live parts around the Bob Dylan loop in Gabrielle's hit
song 'Rise' also provides a good psychological strategy for the less experienced recordist when
it comes to gauging the correct ambience levels. For those sessions "it was a case of setting the
musicians up in the room and then wandering around with the mics until whatever we were
recording sounded like it was in the record."

Love The Leakage

Reverb can also be captured when miking up ensembles. While many multi-room studios are
speci cally set up to record groups of musicians playing together without any spill occurring
between their di erent mics, many high-pro le producers eschew this approach in favour of
using spill creatively as a kind of reverb. Al Schmitt's mastery of this recording style has netted
him multiple Grammys: "You know, a lot of guys are afraid of the leakage problems in the
studio, and I try to explain that if you use good microphones and you get this leakage,
sometimes it's your best friend in the studio, helping to make something sound much bigger
than it really is."

"You just have to keep your wits about you and your ears open," adds Mike Thorne, "so that
when [spill] does happen you can use this extra ambience which wasn't calculated... We've
recorded up to seven people with no separation whatsoever. Various instrumental-type
arrangements, quite odd sections such as bassoon, gong and upright bass, so you can't put
screens up, but with careful mic and personnel placement you optimise the bleed and the
amount of it, so you get to the point where it sounds pretty realistic without using arti cial
reverb at all."

Tony Platt also recommends similar ideas, and details how you go about making the concept
work: "Most important is that the nature of the bleed from one instrument to another is in
context with the instrument that is receiving it. If you've got guitar sound going down the drum
microphones, you don't want it to be a guitar sound that's going to compromise the guitar
sound that you eventually want. If you have a nasal guitar sound coming down the drum mic
but you want the guitar to sound big and warm, then one could compromise the other so it's
necessary to be aware of the fact that you don't just have to blend the primary sounds, you
also have to blend the ambience of those sounds."

"I'll go and move things around quite a bit to make the spill work," adds S Husky Hoskulds. "For
example, if I'm recording drums, piano, and acoustic guitar, I'll often run out while people are
getting sounds and move the piano mic further away to match the ambience in the acoustic
guitar mic, and then pan them left and right. That way the piano and guitar mics actually
include half of the drum sound. A lot of the organ stu that you hear on [Solomon Burke's] Don't
Give Up On Me is well set back in the mix, and I got that sound by using the spill from the
acoustic guitar mic in the next room. With the mics panned in a certain way you get a kind of
'stretch' across the stereo eld. There's no reverb on the track except for what was going on in
the room."

Before anyone comes away with the idea that this approach might lead to a washy, over-
reverberant sound, Steve Hodges' recordings for the Wild Magnolias debut album demonstrate
how tight a sound can be achieved without separation as long as you use a suitably damped
acoustic environment. "[The live room] was super-dead," says Hodge. "What ambience there is
comes from the fact that there were so many open microphones. The walls were very non-
re ective and that meant no standing waves or bass node build-up. The sound is incredibly
tight and punchy. So much so that we used that same way of recording with Lou Rawls when
he demanded that he be able to sing the 'keeper' lead vocals in the same room with and at the
same time as the band. We set up a C12 for him and let him rip and you'd never know there
was no isolation between him and the band."

Controlling Real Reverb

One potential problem with recording room ambience is that of achieving the correct character
— after all, real rooms don't come with the adjustable parameters you nd on digital
reverberators. Craig Leon puts it succinctly: "If you're trying to get an organic [drum] sound, the
room means so much more than which speci c mic you're using."

For this reason, those people who like their reverb real tend to be pretty proactive in
capitalising on all the di erent acoustic spaces available to them, seeking out the best sound to
suit each track. Here's Ben Hillier talking about recording Blur's album Think Tank, for example:

[Link] 3/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
"[The reverb in the main live room] was mental and we wanted to get a much drier sound. The
only place to do that was outside, which is about as dry as you can get. Those were the options
— either completely dry or completely roomy. There were some smaller rooms there as well,
including a derelict bathroom that was great for vocals."

A tried and trusted technique is to record close mics in one space while simultaneously
recording ambient mics in a more acoustically re ective adjacent area. Corridors are a rm
favourite, with Rich Costey, Simon Dawson and Ben Hillier all taking advantage. In the last case,
this trick enabled Hillier to record the drums for a Tom McRae album in his small programming
room: "If I needed more ambience, I'd just open the door to the corridor and stick a mic down
the end. It makes for a more colourful sound." Stairwells have also served faithfully on hit
albums from engineers such as Bob Clearmountain (Roxy Music's Avalon), Jason Corsaro
(Madonna's Like A Virgin), Don Smith (The Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge), and Al Stone
(Jamiroquai's Supersonic).

Bathrooms are a similarly frequent choice, the unique live character imparted by the typical
hard tiled surfaces getting the thumbs up from people like Joe Barresi, Jason Corsaro, Jack
Douglas and Ben Hillier. A recurring refrain here is that they're particularly good for vocal
recording, a nding corroborated by Steve Bush's experiences recording the Stereophonics'
Kelly Jones in the small stone room at Real World studios: "The vocals had a really rich
enhanced sound... All the best singing went down in this particular room, because of its
sound... The ambience helped the vocals sit in the mix well, because the tone of the space is
just right."

Even if the right ambience isn't immediately on hand, though, that doesn't stand between real
professionals and the sound they're after — they just roll their sleeves up and set about
altering acoustics with whatever comes to hand. For example, Bob Clearmountain got creative
to achieve the rock drum sound of Brian Adams' Reckless despite a dead-sounding live room: "I
walked around and found a door o to the side of the studio that led into a loading bay [which]
had this incredible sound... We decided it would be kind of awkward to have Mickey the
drummer in a whole di erent room, so I set up the kit right in front of the door, got these
gobos on which one side was a real hard wood surface, and made a big funnel-shaped device
that focused the sound through the door into the loading bay. I put a couple of room mics in
there, and that's how we got our big rock drum sound. Then I found these big 4' x 8' pieces of
sheet metal [which we put up] on the walls around where the drums were set up, just to try to
get some ambience... It was interesting, to say the least, and was further proof that you can
pretty much achieve anything anywhere."

This is by no means an isolated example. Chris Tsangarides was using screens to simulate a
bass bin when he came up with his 'vortex' technique for guitar recording, while Hugh
Padgham turned to a variety of impromptu and commercial acoustic treatments when keeping
reverb under control for The Police: "Apart from the old thing of closing curtains, putting rugs
on the oor, and ga er-taping bits of carpet onto the walls, we also used studio screens, as well
as things called Tube Traps. If, for instance, someone is playing an acoustic guitar in a quite
reverberant room, you can surround the microphone, the player, and the instrument with
some of these Tube Traps and they'll radically change the reverberant characteristic of the
sound."

Further Reading: The Producer Interviews

The search facility on the SOS web site is
an easy way to access a huge archive of
interviews with many of the world's top
producers. Mike Senior's research for
this article was based on published
interviews with 70 of the world's top
producers, and if his article leaves you
wanting to read more about their
recording and mixing techniques, you
can nd the interviews either in Howard
Massey's Behind The Glass (details
elsewhere in this article) or in the Sound
On Sound online article archive at [Link]. Just enter the producer's
name in the search box and click on the link to the relevant interview, as indicated in the
screen below.

Electrical Interventions
[Link] 4/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
There are lots of examples of engineers using electrical means to tailor the room sound as well.
For example, when Chris Kimsey had decided to record The Rolling Stones all together in one
room for their hit 'Start Me Up', he used a PA fed from the close mics to boost the level of
ambience on Charlie Watts' snare drum, helping it match the ambience from several cranked
guitar amps. And this technique is used by a number of di erent producers, even when there
are no other instruments set up: Steve Churchyard fed some snare signal through a small
Yamaha PA when engineering the Pretenders, while Chris Fogel and Jack Douglas both describe
using powered subwoofers to ll out the bottom end of the kick.

Dynamics processing can mould the recorded

ambience by adjusting its decay characteristics.
"Nine out of 10 times, the room sound will be
compressed to some extent," says Joe Barresi.
"Sometimes it may be severely compressed on
what I call 'Full Canadian' setting, with all
buttons pressed in and to the right. I like the
EMI compressor for its fast attack. I often use
the room mics for reverb, rather than adding
reverb from a digital box."

The other time-honoured dynamics process

here is gating, typically with the gate's side-
chain keyed from one of the close-miked tracks Joe Chiccarelli: "The White Stripes work extremely
quickly, and expected me to be ready to record at any
in the arrangement. Few SOS readers will be
time, so I had several sets of room ambience
unaware of the most famous example of this,
microphones set up in the studio. When they began
created by Hugh Padgham for Phil Collins' 'In to play a song, I could quickly push up the faders and
The Air Tonight', but this kind of processing can choose which microphones best suited the songs."
be found on many other albums in a less
upfront role. Bill Price used the drum close mics to key di erent sets of ambience mics for the
Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks, for instance, while the ampli ed synths on Depeche Mode's
Some Great Reward were treated in similar ways by their engineer Gareth Jones: "I was enjoying
how omni mics and boundary-layer mics captured the rooms, and that was so much a part of
moving on from the '80s gated snare to having ambiences layered onto all the synths... There
were also lots of gates, of course, because we were obsessed with getting rid of tape hiss, as
well as closing down the rooms, even if they weren't gated abruptly along the lines of that
classic gated reverb sound. All of the ambiences were tailored, so when the instruments or
vocals stopped, the ambience would have a controlled shut-down."

If you're still reluctant to try using real room sounds on your own recordings because you feel
that your acoustics aren't up to scratch, bear in mind Jack Douglas' insistence that this is
actually a good reason to go for it. "Try to nd some kind of analogue reverb in your house. Just
the characteristics of that will make it stand out in your mix, simply because it's not going to
sound like anything else... If you go down to your garage and you set up in a corner that has
cement walls, there's going to be a very interesting standing wave there. Any place that has a
strange standing wave is a good place to do a vocal, because it has such a di erent sound."

Howard Massey: Behind The Glass

This great book of interviews is, in my opinion, one of only a handful of truly essential
record-production books, and is packed with down-to-earth recording advice as well as
discussions of the art of production. In addition to the interviews I've referred to in this
article, the book also features such greats as Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Geo
Emerick, and one of the strengths of Massey's approach is that he often asks them
similar questions, which makes for interesting comparisons. There are also two
interesting panel discussions where several of the featured producers discuss their trade
head to head.

£ Behind The Glass by Howard Massey (ISBN 0879306149), £16.95.

Recording With Arti cial Reverb

Before we leave the idea of recorded reverb to look more closely at mix-room tricks, it's as well
to touch on one other fairly common situation where reverb is captured during tracking, and
that's when a unique reverb device is vital to the sound of the track, but may be unavailable to
the mix engineer. Analogue reverb devices such as chambers, plates and springs are all
frequently recorded by the pros for exactly this reason. Our recent interview with Tom Elmhirst
about his mixing for Amy Winehouse gives a good practical demonstration: Mark Ronson's

[Link] 5/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
recordings of di erent collectable springs and plates during tracking on both sides of the
Atlantic gave Elmhirst a range of retro reverb sounds to supplement his own in-house e ects
options.

A tricky situation arises, though, when an instrument's built-in spring reverb turns out to be an
indispensable ingredient of the sound, and it's not possible to record the spring separately.
While Jim Abbiss used compression to pull up the tail of an undercooked recorded spring
reverb while recording guitars for The Arctic Monkeys, dealing with too much printed reverb of
any kind is usually nigh on impossible.

Fortunately, though, there's an ingenious workaround, which Ken Nelson used to great e ect
while recording Coldplay's guitarist Johnny Buckland: "Johnny has a Fender Twin Reverb, and he
has all these [e ects] going into it... I was thinking 'How am I going to get around that?' I just
wanted to have the option of a bit more dryness. They had another Twin Reverb, a slightly
di erent version, and I said 'What would be great would be if you could use both amps, one
having all your [e ects] going into it, and one that's completely dry.' All his e ected sounds
would come out of one amp, so we'd mic that up, and mic the dry one as well, so every time,
we'd record both amps. I think that worked really well — both were used in the mix, and we
just balanced it."

Real Reverb At Mixdown

Although most SOS readers associate capturing real reverb with the tracking stage, in reality a
surprising number of high-pro le practitioners continue to reap the bene ts of this kind of
organic ambience by miking up rooms and then sending sounds from the mixer to them via
some kind of loudspeaker. "I like to use the [live] rooms while I'm mixing," says S Husky
Hoskulds. "I'll usually have two small PAs going and usually a couple of speakers as well, so I
often have all three rooms at the [studio] miked up. All that stu will come back into the mix
through a small submixer at the side of the main console so I have a choice of di erent sounds:
[a stereo mic] in the main room, or a couple of close mics, or a couple of stranger mics on
another PA in another room... People will ask me how I get my room sound, and the simple
answer is: by using the room! There's a lot more character to real rooms, and they don't have
that ag on them that shouts 'Reverb!'. Room sound has dimension to it, because a real room
has real dimensions."

Tony Visconti used room sound at the mix when working on David Bowie's Reality, to recreate
some of the ambient sound from the artist's previous album, recorded at a di erent studio:
"We put the monitors exactly where we'd put the drum kit two years ago and we pointed them
slightly upwards at a 45-degree angle so that they were shooting upwards and outwards. We
also had a pair of Earthworks mics hanging from the rafters, about 25 feet above the monitors,
which is exactly where they were above Matt Chamberlain's drum kit during the Heathen
sessions. We put them through the same preamp and the sound was there automatically. We
then recorded this on a pair of tracks in Logic and brought it back to Looking Glass [Studios] to
use in the mix. The result is that there might be a slight di erence, but overall it sounds as if
the drum kit was [in that room]... It's got a nice one-second decay in there, which is ideal for
drums."

For engineers who regularly mix using real room sounds (people like Bob Clearmountain, Jason
Corsaro, Simon Dawson and John Fry) it clearly makes sense to set up dedicated reverb
chambers, thereby saving on setup time and allowing them to tweak the acoustic
characteristics of the sound without endlessly moving soft furnishings around their recording
spaces! Of course, this is exactly what the top recording studios did before the advent of decent
arti cial reverb devices, and some of the most celebrated studio reverb chambers still draw the
punters to these establishments even today.

All the same techniques that producers use while tracking to tailor the sound of ambience mics
are equally applicable in the context of chamber reverb. John Fry, for example, talks about
shortening the reverb time of one of his reverb chambers with rolls of breglass, while Tony
Platt gated the sound of the massive recording room at Galaxy Studios to alter its apparent size
for di erent tracks when working with industrial band Die Krupps. While there are those who
argue that convolution processing can now perfectly replicate chamber sounds, reproducing
these kinds of real-world tactics is a lot more complex, so I don't expect the concept of using
PAs and mics at mixdown to start pushing up the daisies for a good few years yet.

Analogue Reverb Simulators

To run a reverb chamber during the mix, you obviously need to have spare mics, speakers, and
oor space, but you may also need understanding neighbours if you're going to drive the

[Link] 6/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
system loud enough to minimise background noise, so this can limit the viability of this
technique for owners of smaller studios. In this case, there is no choice but to create any
required additional reverb by more arti cial means.

Before digital technology came along, the two main technologies that rst allowed us to create
fake reverb were the spring and plate units, all-analogue devices that created vibrations within
bits of metal and then recorded the internal re ections via transducers. Although none of these
devices can be said to have what you might call a natural sound, they were used a tremendous
amount by record producers of the '60s and '70s, during which time their designs were re ned
to deliver results which were, in musical rather than technical terms, extremely successful.

Springs, in particular, seem to be prized for the

unique colour they bring to a recording,
typically some prominent upper mid-range
presence combined with a bottom-heavy
reverb decay and a lot of strong resonant
peaks. Although there is inevitably some retro
appeal to their use in some cases, some
producers nd them useful beyond this,
because their distinctive tone can actually
make individual e ected tracks more
prominent in the mix — on the face of it,
exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from Joe Barresi: "Nine out of 10 times the room sound will
a reverb. "You can make [the reverb] short and be compressed to some extent," says Joe Barresi.
tight with a gate and it adds tone and depth to "Sometimes it may be severely compressed on what I
the sound without washing it out," explains call 'Full Canadian' setting, with all buttons pressed in
and to the right."
Manny Marroquin. "When you have one thing
in a crowded mix you really want to bring out, but adding EQ would make it sound too harsh,
put it through a spring reverb."

As regards speci c units, Ben Hillier and Flood both like the spring built into the EMS VCS3
suitcase synth, while Steve Albini and Dave Fridmann rave about AKG's rare BX20 spring tower.
"In its day it was the bee's knees for long reverbs," explains Albini. "It was a $5000-10,000
device when it was made, in the late '60s and early '70s. It's about six feet tall and has two
spiral reverb springs and it sounds lovely." Other dedicated commercial models turned up in
my research too, such as the Furman RV1, Great British Spring, and units by Master Room and
Touched By Sound. However, there was also evidence of people re-amping parts during mixing
speci cally to take advantage of their guitar amp's internal spring, and some producers had
even exed their soldering irons to cobble one together for themselves.

Although plate reverbs in many cases improved upon the design shortcomings of springs by
o ering much smoother frequency-response and reverb-decay characteristics, their dense
reverb tails, lack of discernible early re ections and generally bright sound still gave them a
unique unnatural character that many engineers fell in love with during their '60s and '70s
heyday. What I found surprising, though, while trawling the interview archives, was the extent
to which this love a air has continued into the digital age, with producers such as Gil Norton,
Eddie Kramer, Phil Ramone, Elliot Scheiner and Stephen Harris still actively seeking them out
for recent projects.

The stereo EMT140 is widely considered to be the king of plate reverbs, and most of the people
mentioning plate reverb seem to refer to the EMT marque in the same breath. "I won't use
anything but EMT plates," said Stephen Harris, when we interviewed him about his work on
some of U2's more recent hits. "If a studio hasn't got an EMT plate, I won't use it!" Hugh
Padgham is equally appreciative: "When I'm mixing, I love using EMT140s. I realise that a lot of
young engineers today would rarely use an echo plate — the EMTs at The Townhouse [were]
always free whenever I want[ed] to use one there — but I'm not a massive fan of digital reverbs.
The plates have a real warmth and spread of sound."

Some Digital Classics

Of all the digital reverb processors I encountered in my research, none are name-checked more
frequently than Lexicon's one-time agship 480L, a unit which for many years had as great a
claim to the moniker 'industry standard' as any piece of studio hardware. Needless to say, the
list of users includes many of the most in-demand mix engineers on the planet — names such
as Tom Lord-Alge, Elliot Scheiner, Spike Stent, Tony Maserati and Manny Marroquin. However,
a large number of Lexicon's other units also appear to be in regular use at the highest level, not
least the company's preceding and current top-of-the-line machines, the 224XL and 960L. "I tell
you one thing," comments Serge Tsai, "I have not heard a plug-in sound as good as the 960L.
It's a crazy box."

[Link] 7/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
Particular favourites appear to be the PCM series, counting Steve Albini, Flood, Tom Lord-Alge,
Pierre Marchand and Tony Maserati amongst their fans. Not only are the more well-known
PCM80 and PCM90 studio workhorses singled out, though, but also the earlier PCM60 (John
Leckie: "very rich and clear") and PCM70 ("It sounds dirty and ties things together," says Jason
Goldstein. "A little bit of PCM70 used to go on about everything I did, on a tiled room setting,
which is a very small room."). Honourable mention must also be made of the Lexicon M300,
which Chris Lord-Alge credits with "a really nice, distinct and clean long reverb" and Chuck
Ainlay considers one of his default mix e ects for "a sound that shimmers more. It's a brighter
reverb with a bit more sheen to it, more like a plate."

Yamaha also make a good showing in the league tables, with the REV7 nding admirers in Craig
Bauer, Marius DeVries, Tom Lord-Alge and Al Stone ("I'll usually have one long reverb, like a
Lexicon 480, and perhaps a short one-second reverb from a Yamaha REV7, a good old 12-bit
reverb"), while the SPX-series multi-e ects crop up all over the place. Little is said, though,
about speci c patches used with the latter, so we're none the wiser as to whether it's reverb or
auto-panning that people are actually using. The same applies to the Eventide Harmonizer
series of multi-e ects processors, which seem to appear in everyone's rack without any
comment on what patches are used.

Eventide's vintage SP2016 reverb, on the other hand, is a clear hit with David Pensado: "My all-
time favourite hardware reverb is probably the Eventide 2016. I love its darkness. I have both
old and new versions, and I manage to sneak them in on almost every mix. I use the stereo
room preset... It's the reverb on those original Mariah Carey records, and I just love the sound
of it." Jack Joseph Puig is also a fan of this reverb on strings: "I used an Eventide 2016 reverb set
at stereo room, 3.2 seconds decay time, fronted by a 92-110ms pre-delay. I almost always use
this setting on strings. Set it to this and let it rock, there's nothing better."

Another venerable digital reverb that still appears to be in regular use is the AMS RMX16,
Humberto Gatica's nomination for best vocal reverb. "The AMS still has that non-linear setting
and the classic long reverb that you can't change and that nothing else can duplicate," adds
Chris Lord-Alge. The EMT250, a unit that looks like a small robot and has a strong claim to being
the rst commercial digital reverb, also has friends in high places, turning up in Tom Lord Alge's
mix room and being another of Chuck Ainlay's default mixdown send e ects. "Basically, it was a
very, very short reverb," explains David Tickle. "You could barely hear it, but it was just enough
to lift the voice and the snare."

In recent years, Sony have led the way in hardware convolution technology with their monster
DRES777 box, but amongst fans like the Lord-Alge brothers, it's their earlier DRE2000 which has
the greatest cachet. "I use the Sony DRE2000 on drums and percussion," say Chris, "and they
have never improved on that sound." Pierre Marchand also likes another of their pre-
convolution boxes, the R7. Roland have also come a long way since the SRV330 and SRV2000,
but these units still seem to get more press (from the likes of Chuck Ainlay, Glen Ballard, and
Craig Bauer) than their newer models.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that even with racks of the most collectable and
cutting-edge gear, a large number of mix engineers deliberately seek out old consumer-level
boxes from companies such as Alesis, Boss, Digitech, Ensoniq, and Zoom. The undisputed
champion in this arena has to be the Alesis Quadraverb, which holds its head high in the
studios of Jerry Boys, Glen Ballard, Marius DeVries, Spike Stent ("highly recommended"), and
many others. "It's not a Lexicon 480L," admits Ballard, "but there's a couple of things in here
which I really like, and I hate to throw stu out if I have to go nd it again on eBay ve years
later."

Golden Oldies
But what about reverb plug-ins? Well, what I found is that, despite rooting through every SOS
interview until the end of 2007, I only found about a dozen mentions of speci c software
reverbs, and most of the top pros still seem to prefer the hardware options. Jason Goldstein
o ered a possible explanation in SOS April 2007: "Only during the last year have the plug-in
manufacturers nally come up with good-quality in-the-box reverbs. If your reverb is not of
good enough quality, it muddies the whole record up, and you may not realise it until it is too
late... I felt that a lot of plug-in reverbs sound like an e ect. But you can now throw tons of TC
[Electronic] VSS3 plug-in reverbs on things, and it will just feel bigger."

This can only be part of the explanation, though, because there's also a de nite preference
amonst many of the top names for speci c vintage reverbs. Justin Niebank isolates another
factor at work: "When you use reverb and e ects like that, you want to stay out of the way of
the vocal. The vintage gear actually helps you achieve this goal because the older stu doesn't

[Link] 8/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
have the same degree of frequency response as some of the newer high-end signal processors.
Thus, the reverb doesn't cover the entire spectrum of the track."

Mitchell Froom also nds the stereo nature of modern reverbs distracting, preferring to use a
plate or a spring very sparingly instead. "In general I don't like bright, sizzly digital reverbs,
particularly if there's more than one going on at the same time. They're usually in stereo as
well, and things start happening to music that you can't even anticipate. You get huge amounts
of clatter and jitter with all these reverbs clashing with each other, and the tone of the
instrument itself is lost."

Jimmy Douglass limits his use of digital reverbs for a di erent reason: "You spend a lot of time
carving in analogue to make things poke out. But in digital everything is poking out and sticking
in your face already, so the challenge is to smooth it out and stick it back there. In e ect I'm
trying to de-emphasise [when I mix]: smoothing things without muddying them up. I try to use
less digital reverb for that reason, because everything in digital sounds the same, and digital
reverb multiplies that emphasis. So instead I try to nd wacky e ects like I used in [Justin
Timberlake's ' Sexyback'], that aren't just mirrors of the same frequencies that are already
there."

How Much Reverb?

Many productions of the '70s and '80s wore their reverb with pride, but it's fair to say that
tastes since then have changed such that reverb is usually employed in a more background
role. This shift has been acknowledged in print by numerous producers. "I was pretty happy
with [Roxy Music's Avalon]," muses Bob Clearmountain, "but listening to it now I'd do it
completely di erent. I used too much reverb on that." "I use maybe a quarter of the reverb I
used to use," states Eddie Kramer.

An intriguing explanation for this trend is put forward for this by John Leckie, which also raises
the important issue of how your monitoring a ects your judgement of reverb levels: "Di erent
control rooms in di erent studios will make the reverb sound di erent. For instance, if you
listen in a really small, dead control room, you tend to add more reverb than you need. When
you go to a more live mastering room, there may suddenly be too much reverb... But the trend
now seems to be towards bigger, more live control rooms, so we've got deader records. People
aren't putting as much reverb on records simply because they're hearing the reverb in the
room, so they don't think they need it. But when you take it away, it sounds dry... As soon as I
walk into a typical live-end dead-end control room with bare oors, I ask for some carpets on
the oor. The studio manager inevitably asks me why, and my answer is simply that I listen to
records in rooms with carpet on the oor."

A rule of thumb that is often suggested when applying reverb

these days is to nd a level where you don't hear it as an
'e ect' in its own right, but you feel you're missing something
if you mute the return completely, and many of the top
producers seem to approach their reverb use in this kind of
way. Jason Goldstein: "I like clarity. I don't want to actually hear
reverbs." Elliot Scheiner: "If I'm going to use a reverb, I want it
to be inconspicuous." Al Stone: " I hate the sound of something
which appears to have something stuck on it, but if you can
make [reverb] feel natural, then it's very e ective."

It's also advisable to keep most of your reverbs fairly short

these days. "If I'm using reverb," explains Eddie Kramer, "it's of
the short kind, in deference to today's sounds — 1s, 0.5s, with
short decay times." Another sensible tactic is suggested by Jack
Douglas: "[The reverb time] depends on the instrument. I
always go by the amount of sustain the instrument has,
because you really don't hear much reverb until the Al Stone: "Rather than have a
reverb on throughout a track, I'd
instrument dies."
rather ick it on and o throughout
a song in two or three places.
Certain short reverbs can even make a track sound drier,
That's what an e ect should be. If
according to John Leckie: "Sometimes you can use e ects to it's on all the time it cancels itself
give the impression that there's even less reverb than no out."
reverb! You can actually make something drier by adding
something. For example, using the Lexicon 480 Small Room algorithm, or something with an
early re ection, 40ms or so. Anything that's short and a little bit dark kind of makes the sound a
little bigger and a little drier as well."

[Link] 9/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
A handful of producers, however, are more ascetic when it comes to reverb — people like
Mitchell Froom, Tchad Blake (back in 1997 he said "I've only used reverb on maybe two records
in the last 10 years".), and Steve Albini. "I don't think [reverb is] as necessary as most engineers
and producers think it is," remarks Albini. "They use it almost as a reaction, an automatic re ex:
when a singer starts singing, they put reverb on it. It's a thing that's done pro forma a lot of the
time. They put it on because they feel they're supposed to. I've never had that response. I'll wait
until someone says 'That sounds weird,' and then I'll try reverb."

There have been some very successful records where the producer has banished the reverb
altogether, in order to distance the production from this hallmark of smooth studio production
in pursuit of an edgier vibe. Craig Bauer recalls his work on Kanye West's Late Registration:
"There is not an ounce of reverb. I [originally] put a lot of reverb on the vocals on the Brandy
track to make it sound really lush, like an R&B track. Reverb on the strings, too. Very rich-
sounding. He sent it back and said 'Take it all o .' So I go back and I'm listening to this dry, stark
orchestration and I keep listening until it dawns on me — Kanye doesn't want this to sound like
a brilliant, lush R&B mix; he wants it gritty and street and hip-hop, even though the song isn't
what you'd normally consider in that vein."

Artists are also becoming more tech-savvy these days, and many of them are becoming
uncomfortable with the sound of reverb too, presenting a signi cant challenge to the mix
engineer, who still needs to create a sense of blend at the mix. "Artists say they want drier-
sounding vocals," con rms Michael Brauer, "but what they really mean is that they want
something other than reverb. When you hear the vocal truly dry, it loses its life. So you go in
search of other types of e ect." Everyone seems to have their own tricks to solve this problem,
but I came across compression, delay, distortion, chorusing, double-tracking, re-amping, pitch-
shifting, and even Auto-Tune being used in lieu of reverb.

How Many Reverbs?

One question that I've frequently been asked by SOS readers is how many di erent reverbs
they should use on their mix. This is not an easy question to answer, because di erent mix
engineers take quite di erent approaches. The most straightforward, though, is probably to
have two or three global reverbs set up as send e ects, to which you feed signals from the
di erent tracks so that you get the impression they're all in the same kind of acoustic space. "A
lot of times people add so many di erent reverbs that they compete with each other, and it
sounds incongruous," comments Mike Clink. "It doesn't seem to gel together. I think reverb has
to be the glue that makes everything sound like it was recorded in one setting, so I'll feed
multiple instruments into one or two reverbs."

Of course, the next question is how each of

those reverbs should be set up. Irrespective of
the speci c gear you use, the key thing that the
pros tend to be looking for is contrast, so that
each reverb o ers di erent useful
characteristics. Reverb time is, of course, one
important variable, as in this example from the
age of analogue reverbs. "The way I would
normally con gure the [three EMT plates]... was
to have one set very short, one set medium,
and one set somewhat longer," describes John
Fry. "We frequently set up our [three] chambers that way, too."

Elliott Scheiner and Chuck Ainlay go for the

global reverbs approach too, but supplement
these in certain circumstances. Scheiner: "I'll
use other reverbs for more speci c things —
those things that weren't tracked at the same
time or need to have some other kind of thing
happening." Says Ainlay, "There are three or
four reverbs that will work for the general mix.
And then I'll have speci c reverbs for speci c
instruments, like the [gated Lexicon PCM70] will
be on percussion instruments; I may also use
inverse reverbs and things like that, small room
sounds."
For artici al reverb, hardware remains a popular
An alternative approach is to have individual choice amongst top producers — from classic digital
reverb units such as the Lexicon PCM80 and 90(
reverbs for separate instruments, a tactic once
the preserve of the big studios, but which the

[Link] 10/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
rise of the plug-in has now brought within above left) to vintage mechanical units including
spring reverbs (above) and the EMT Plate 140 (left).
reach of small studios too. "Each instrument
will have its own e ect," explains Eddie Kramer. "I'll use eight or 10 e ects, multiple layers of
reverbs. They're subtle, some of them are absolutely down in level, but usually very short now."

Taking the approach to something of an extreme, though, is Jon Gass, who uses them as much
for their tonal qualities as their spatial ones: "I might use 10 or 15 di erent reverb delays in the
mix, but I don't really use 'long hall' or any of those types of reverbs. They're all either really
short or a chorus, and I use them to create space without destroying the track with EQ. That
would be the last thing I'd do. I'd rather create a little vibe, and that's not down to training but
just a musical way of mixing."

EQ & Pre-delay
I'm always surprised how few SOS readers take the time to EQ their reverb returns, as this is
one of the most common processing tips o ered in producer interviews. There are two main
reasons given for this, the rst of which is summed up nicely by Phil Tan: "Sometimes you have
to carve out a space for a reverb with EQ and by shaping the reverb characteristics — attack,
release time, length, and so on — so that it does not interfere with the other frequencies in the
song."

The other reason why engineers seem to be EQ'ing their reverbs is to deal with the vagaries of
more characterful options such as springs and plates. "One of the hardest things to teach
somebody is to listen to the device itself," complains Phil Ramone. "Take out the source and
listen to the device. You'd be amazed how crummy some of these things sound! They ange,
they phase, there's cancellation all over the place." All's not lost, however. "Sometimes the
weirdest things — like old spring reverbs — can sound really phenomenal in a mix." reveals
Jack Douglas. "By itself, it's going to sound awful... but use it right — colour it a little bit, lter it,
EQ it — and it's going to sound cool in your mix." And how do you know where to EQ? Manny
Marroquin shares another tip: "I listen for the frequency where the reverb matches the input
signal and tweak that."

The most widely discussed reverb parameter is certainly the decay time, but pre-delay coasts
easily into second place — engineers were pre-delaying chamber reverbs using tape delay a
half a century ago, and the technique comes up in interviews with such legends as Eddie
Kramer, Alan Parsons and Tony Visconti. A good reason for using pre-delay is explained by Glen
Ballard: "I'm always interested in hearing the vocalist's words... so I like to have the dry signal a
little bit clear of the e ect, just for the articulation. If it's a really slow song, say a ballad, then
the pre-delay will probably be longer." In other cases engineers are using pre-delay to tempo-
sync the onset of the reverb envelope, supporting the track's rhythm. "I don't normally pay a lot
of attention to exact reverb time," comments Phil Tan. "It's only with delays or reverb pre-
delays that you want them exactly in time."

About The Author

Ex-SOS Reviews Editor and regular contributor Mike Senior has worked professionally
with artists such as the Charlatans, Nigel Kennedy, Therapy and Wet Wet Wet. He now
runs Cambridge Music Technology, delivering courses based on the studio techniques of
the world's most famous producers.

[Link]

Mono Or Stereo?
Where possible, almost everyone returns the outputs of stereo reverb devices to the mix in
stereo, but this is by no means the only option out there. Elliott Scheiner: "I've always felt that
part of the charm of old records is that you could hear the reverbs return to the same place as
the instrument. Like if I have an electric guitar on the left, the reverb returns to the left as well,
so all the sound comes from one place. When I mixed records in the '70s... I would use three
140 plates: one I'd dedicate to the left, one to the right, and one to the centre... We decided to
go for a 140 plate sound on [Steely Dan's] Everything Must Go, and I did pretty much the same
thing."

Joe Chiccarelli also describes panning mono reverb returns to match the dry source tracks
when he was mixing The White Stripes' Icky Thump, whereas Lou Bradley took the opposite
approach for Charlie Rich's 'The Most Beautiful Girl', panning the plate reverb on Pete Drake's
slide guitar part to the opposite side of the stereo eld to create a nice little production hook.

[Link] 11/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |
Even if you follow the herd and go for straight stereo reverbs, Phil Ramone still has a few words
of warning: "You really should listen to [the reverb] in mono to make sure that what you're
hearing is what you get. That's why a lot of television shows get so screwed up. They come in
with these great e ects, but when they check in mono, half the signal goes away, or half the
reverb goes away."

Automated Reverb
The nal hot tip that comes up time and again in interviews with producers is that you should
use fader rides to adjust the reverb levels during the track, and there's no excuse for not
experimenting with this now that mixer automation facilities are so widely available. For a start,
Al Stone points out that having reverb on all the time reduces its impact: "Rather than have a
reverb on throughout a track, I'd rather ick it on and o throughout a song in two or three
places. That's what an e ect should be. If it's on all the time it cancels itself out."

By the same token, you can increase the drama

of selected song sections if you save a separate
reverb just for them. "I'll pick the spots [for
reverb]", say Tony Maserati, "like on a very
emotional high point of a song." Alternatively,
momentarily switching an existing reverb o
can also catch the listener's ear, especially if
the source in question is your lead vocal. "One
thing I like to do... is to use a small room on
something, and then once the listener is aware
of the sound, just cut it out, then bring it back
in again," suggests John Leckie.

The other main reason top engineers seem to

be riding their e ects is to provide that elusive
feeling of momentum that drives a mix along, Professionals have often regarded plug-ins as the
and really lets you know when the chorus has poor relations of hardware reverb, but with good
arrived. Tom Elmhirst used this approach on quality modelling plug-ins such as UAD's Plate 140
the drums for Amy Winehouse's 'Rehab', for and convolution reverbs such as Audioease's Altiverb
now on the market, this situation is begining to
example: "I had the drum spring on a separate
change.
fader and was riding it. You can hear on the
track that the drum track is dryer in the verses, while the reverb comes right up in the chorus
and the bridge."

Nowhere is this technique more useful than when the mix relies heavily on loops. "When I have
a loop like that without change," reveals Mark Endert "the way I can achieve contour is by
changing the amounts of e ects. So at the beginning [of Maroon 5's 'Makes Me Wonder'] there
are minimal e ects on the guitar loop, then when it hits the rst verse there are more delays,
when it hits the chorus there is chorusing and delay and reverb on it... In the verses it's more
like a 16th slap feel, and when it gets to the choruses, I harmonised with an AMS 1580S, pitch-
changing and fattening the guitars. You can get a lot of contour out of a track that lacks
dynamics just by changing the acoustic space around it."

Another situation where automation can be handy is where there are problems to be solved.
John Leckie: "Whenever there's a little sibilance or a little something that ends with a sharp
attack which sets the reverb o , just trim the e ect send during the mix to where you can't
hear it. You've still got the bigness, but it never sounds reverby."

Room For Improvement

It should be pretty clear by now that digital reverb is only one of the tools at your disposal for
creating space in your own music, and that there is much to be gained from picking up some of
what you need while tracking. Even if you only have access to digital reverb, I hope that you've
found some useful tricks to improve your mixes nonetheless, as well as getting more use out of
the spring and plate patches in your plug-in's preset library.

Published August 2008

BUY PDF VERSION

Previous article Next article

[Link] 12/13
20/7/2018 Use Reverb Like A Pro: Part 2 |

New forum posts Recent topics Recently active forums

Re: Is Logic used by many pros vs Reaper and w Sound Toys sale on New Products & Industry News
desmond
Mixing, Mastering & Post Production
dodgy cable/interesting sound e ect. why? Recording: Gear & Techniques
Mixing, Mastering & Post Production Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:55 pm
DIY Electronics & Studio Design
Re: Audio Technica AE3000 Microphone Is Logic used by many pros vs Reaper and what
Music Business
GRAHAM99 Feedback
Audio Technica AE3000 Microphone
Recording: Gear & Techniques Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:52 pm
Mac Music
Aria Sinsonido preamp repair Guitar Technology
Re: Aria Sinsonido preamp repair

Logarhythm Apps & Other Computers/OS

[SoundCloud] my music
DIY Electronics & Studio Design Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:48 pm Live Sound & Performance
Well done Phil! Music Theory, Songwriting & Composition
Re: Audio Technica AE3000 Microphone
Keyboards & Synthesis
Hugh Robjohns Funny smell - electrical fault ? Windows Music
Recording: Gear & Techniques Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:48 pm
User Reviews
New MacBook Pros
Re: Aria Sinsonido preamp repair Remote Collaboration
blinddrew What are the best mixing headphones in 2018 SOS Support Forum
DIY Electronics & Studio Design Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:47 pm Useful Information Archive

Contact Us Cookie Policy Help Privacy Policy Terms of Use

All contents copyright © SOS Publications Group and/or its licensors, 1985-2018. All rights reserved.
The contents of this article are subject to worldwide copyright protection and reproduction in whole or part, whether mechanical or electronic, is expressly forbidden without the prior
written consent of the Publishers. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held
responsible for its contents. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers.

Web site designed & maintained by PB Associates & SOS

[Link] 13/13