If you had to guess on a reverb...

"Reverb" is such a ubiquitous term. There are so many types out there...plate, spring, room, etc, all of which are most certainly overused by the rank amateur (I'm no exception), especially when it comes to vocals. What might be helpful is to know how the vocal tracks of popular songs might've been treated during recording/mixing. Just to keep it simple, how about:

Yesterday
Oh Darling! (This isn't strictly a Beatles thing, I promise.)
Slip Sliding Away (Paul Simon)

There's obviously a million more, but I specifically chose these because of how uncluttered the arrangements are. It's easy to focus on the vocals with these. So, if you had to guess (or maybe you might have some trivia socked away somewhere), how'd they do these?

I would tend to choose a plate reverb for a 70's sound and some kind of chamber or room for a 60's sound where many of the studios had their own echo chambers. I prefer to use a reverb that can be edited quickly so my favourite hardware reverbs are an old Ibanez SDR1000 or an Eventide H3000. My current favourite plug-in is Epicverb (for plates) or Silverspike's Room Machine. While I may start out with a preset, I will always modify it depending upon the feel of the song that I am working on.

James.

Nice Question Dawgman,

I myself has a question about reverbs too. Mainly what reverb do they use in order to produce those of classical recording. I know they go to a Moorish Castle and enormous cathedrals just to get that sound. But is there any reverb there that could replicate this effect? Just askin.

Paul Adrian

Any classical recording worth its salt has no reverb added; the acoustic space is considered part of the "instrument," or source sound, and is engineered in as such.  The recording venue (such as your Moorish castle) would be considered specifically for its acoustic properties.

However, I have created some pretty wonderful (if I do say so myself) reverbs within Audition by carefully matching settings to what I expect a space to sound like, with meticulous listening and adjustment.  You won't find better reverb for the price.  Likely for a greater price, too.

The finest reverbs around are convolution-based, using samples of real acoustic spaces.  Expect $$$$ for this done right. 

Audition's can sound really, really good.  But no digital reverb can replace the subtleties and beauty of a great recording space.

The finest reverbs around are convolution-based, using samples of real acoustic spaces.  Expect $$$$ for this done right. 

Audition's can sound really, really good.  But no digital reverb can replace the subtleties and beauty of a great recording space.

It might be worth pointing out that some of Audition's reverbs are convolution reverbs. They can sound very good given the right impulses but, when I last tried them, their downfall was the poor set of impulses included with Audition. I'm not sure whether that has improved with the newer versions.

James.

Great point.  That's why Audition's Full Reverb sounds great.  When I meant $$$$ hardware convolution-based reverbs, I'm talking gear where the sampling has been engineered very carefully and the gear comes loaded with real samples from real concert halls or other spaces.  Yes, I agree that Audition's impulses are sorely lacking by comparison, but have every bit the potential to sound as good as the hardware reverb units if they had the same quality of impulses.

When I arrived at the BBC many of the desks dated back to the days of chamber reverbs - unfortunately for the amateur historian the rooms themselves had long since been superseded, but the desk controls would allow for the remote resizing of the chambers (which I gather would be booked for a specific session and patched through to your desk via the main Broadcasting House Control Room) so as to be able to control the length of the reverb. My memory of the other controls is hazy - as I say, these were legacy controls and no longer worked, but I always liked the idea that somewhere down in the basement someone had constructed a room with microphone, speakers and moving walls to do what by then we were doing with a relatively small digital box - Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizers were pretty standard BBC kit by the time I arrived.

I remember, vaguely, one of the rooms. Very dusty. I remember the EMT plates being installed. Then I moved to areas where we had to cobble together our own devices from springs and some old Quad valve amps and pre-amps (presumably worth a fortune now). Then we bought locally, ex USAF base, a pair of varispeed Ampex's with huge power amps (807 valves) that drove the capstans in the bottom of the wooden trolleys so we could get the SUN sound slap back echo to match the band. Lovely machines compared with the Leevers-Wretched that I was used to.

I retired from all that soon after we got a Lexicon something or other and now I'm all software.

I remember reading Chet Atkins in Nashville's account of trying to get the money men in New York to replace the stairwell (I think it was) by an EMT plate. Such a familiar scenario.

Those were the days, my friend.