a reverb technology primer

[øøøøøøø]

Hey y'all,

Some of you know that I sometimes get asked to write things for blogs. The Soundfly folks asked if I would write a thing describing the basic mechanisms behind several of the most common reverb technologies historically and in current use.

I think it came out pretty interesting- even if you know quite a bit about the topic, I do feel it's likely there will be something in here that's new to you.

http://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/ar ... ch-primer/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hope you like!

[MrShake]

I'm addicted to reverb, it would be my one "desert island effect". I've always loved the history of the technology, but I'm not very knowledgable about the science behind it. A fascinating article, thanks for sharing.

[Larry Mal]

I used to have access to a plate reverb at school. Man, I loved that thing. Clearly I can't have a plate reverb in my apartment but I came to love the UAD plate reverb plug in, but gave up my UAD cards. Now I have the Waves Abbey Road package and I don't love it as much, but I'm still learning it.

I'm a big fan of reverbs. Good article!

[budda12ax7]

Great article.....

[antisymmetric]

That's great, and thanks for including the histories. Awesome!

[saxjag]

Informative, readable article as always, Brad!

There's a story that Dick Dale encouraged Leo Fender to incorporate a reverb tank in an amp because he liked the natural delay/reverb of his guitar sound bouncing back from the far wall of the El Monte American Legion Hall, where he & his band often played for teen crowds. This is how reverb became associated with surf music.

Coincidentally, I once met an airline stewardess who claimed to have dated Dick Dale. Why the subject of musicians came up I don't exactly remember, but there's a good chance I was stuffing a couple of saxes into an overhead bin at the time...

[selectomatic]

That was a great read! Factual and informative, yet completely accessible -- and no grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors getting in the way or undermining the article's credibility. Thanks for linking to it here.

[sessylU]

Good stuff.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but your "Write it Tight" entry really is excellent. As a composition major who now teaches I find it a constant struggle trying to get kids to pay attention to what they've put on the page.

[øøøøøøø]

Good stuff.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but your "Write it Tight" entry really is excellent. As a composition major who now teaches I find it a constant struggle trying to get kids to pay attention to what they've put on the page.

Ah! Glad you liked that one. I'm not sure I ever linked it here; I wasn't sure the "OSG audience" would've found that interesting, but I was probably wrong!

[Shadoweclipse13]

Really good article!! Unfortunately, I'm at work, so I'll have to listen to the sound examples later

[shadowplay]

Interesting read thanks.

Sort of related but does anyone know about use of intentional use of reverb/echo in pre recorded music? I don't know a lot about any trivia/technical details surrounding classical music, so I was wondering if anyone knew pieces which were location specific or used techniques to simulate it. You know composed for a particular cavern or something or using some heath Robinson gadget.

The reason I thought about it was Emika the electronic musician was trying to crowd fund an opera/symphony and in one of the proposition films and in the written pitch she was talking about her ambitions to simulate the echo she uses a lot in her electronic work in the classical composition.

Emika - Echo Concept (the music at the end isn't from the classical piece it's actually this featuring the soprano she uses on the classical piece)

in case anyone is interested,

Melanfonie - Featuring soprano Michaela Srumova, performed by The Prague Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Paul Batson. The echo simulation is best heard on Letting Go.

D

[øøøøøøø]

Interesting read thanks.

Sort of related but does anyone know about use of intentional use of reverb/echo in pre recorded music? I don't know a lot about any trivia/technical details surrounding classical music, so I was wondering if anyone knew pieces which were location specific or used techniques to simulate it. You know composed for a particular cavern or something or using some heath Robinson gadget.

The reason I thought about it was Emika the electronic musician was trying to crowd fund an opera/symphony and in one of the proposition films and in the written pitch she was talking about her ambitions to simulate the echo she uses a lot in her electronic work in the classical composition.

Emika - Echo Concept (the music at the end isn't from the classical piece it's actually this featuring the soprano she uses on the classical piece)

in case anyone is interested,

Melanfonie - Featuring soprano Michaela Srumova, performed by The Prague Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Paul Batson. The echo simulation is best heard on Letting Go.

D

Great question, and absolutely

I really wanted to touch on this in the article, but I figured only a few people would read 5,000 words about reverb. So I narrowed my scope.

Another early reverb pioneer was Bob Fine on the "Mercury Living Presence" classical records of the early 1950s. He chose Schoeps microphones in part because their increased sensitivity and "reach" allowed them to be placed a bit further back in the hall, picking up more of the hall's ambience. He tried other things, like sending a signal off the tape machine's repro head to a speaker in the back of the hall to get more ambience/reflection in the mic.

Nowadays, classical records often use multi-mic arrays with mics positioned in the back of the hall for added ambience.

I was supposed to be involved with the recording recently of a suite of pieces that were written specifically to exploit the use of the acoustic characteristics of the respective insides of a series of enormous scupltures upstate. But I think the project lost funding (or had trouble securing permission? dont remember) and stalled. But there were weird reverb characteristics inside these giant walk-in sculptures, and a composer friend wrote pieces to exploit the unique character of each one (or was in the process of writing)

[saxjag]

In 1968, jazz flute/sax player Paul Horn recorded himself playing inside the Taj Mahal. The success of that album led to a series of improvisational recordings featuring the interior ambiance of the Great Pyramid, a Tibetan monastery, and other acoustically interesting architectural spaces around the globe.

[shadowplay]

I really wanted to touch on this in the article, but I figured only a few people would read 5,000 words about reverb. So I narrowed my scope.

Another early reverb pioneer was Bob Fine on the "Mercury Living Presence" classical records of the early 1950s. He chose Schoeps microphones in part because their increased sensitivity and "reach" allowed them to be placed a bit further back in the hall, picking up more of the hall's ambience. He tried other things, like sending a signal off the tape machine's repro head to a speaker in the back of the hall to get more ambience/reflection in the mic.

Nowadays, classical records often use multi-mic arrays with mics positioned in the back of the hall for added ambience.

I was supposed to be involved with the recording recently of a suite of pieces that were written specifically to exploit the use of the acoustic characteristics of the respective insides of a series of enormous scupltures upstate. But I think the project lost funding (or had trouble securing permission? dont remember) and stalled. But there were weird reverb characteristics inside these giant walk-in sculptures, and a composer friend wrote pieces to exploit the unique character of each one (or was in the process of writing)

Ah interesting, I've been aware of project like the one you mentioned over the years like ones by David Toop and Max Eastley or recording in specific ambient spaces like Saxjag mentions, like for example Dreams Less Sweet recorded in the hellfire caves and reproduced using Zuccarelli Holophonic systems.

I'm still curious about actual notation to simulate echo (like Emika was shooting for) or even score notes pointing towards the sort of ambient space a piece is to be performed in. I imagine this would go right back to our ancestors taking their hollow log into a specific cave to get the repeats as they banged it. This is touched on in the absolutely brilliant BBC Radio series Noise: A Human History which is a genuinely fascinating series about humankinds relationship with sound. Sadly it's no longer free to stream but there are some clips here and you can get thewhole thing on itunes and possibly elsewhere for less, though even at itunes prices it's good value since it's 8 hours of material.

D

[MrShake]

I'm still curious about actual notation to simulate echo (like Emika was shooting for) or even score notes pointing towards the sort of ambient space a piece is to be performed in. I imagine this would go right back to our ancestors taking their hollow log into a specific cave to get the repeats as they banged it. This is touched on in the absolutely brilliant BBC Radio series Noise: A Human History which is a genuinely fascinating series about humankinds relationship with sound. Sadly it's no longer free to stream but there are some clips here and you can get thewhole thing on itunes and possibly elsewhere for less, though even at itunes prices it's good value since it's 8 hours of material.

D

Maybe it's just my current state of mind, or that I've been in a reverb-heavy compositional place recently, but I can't believe I'd never considered this. The equivalent of early caveman composers thinking, "I not bang rock in this cave, not sound big enough. This rock bang only sound good in cave across town". Or even classical-era composers writing pieces specifically based around a specific's concert hall's unique reverberant characteristics (i.e., not to be performed just anywhere the charts may travel). What's the history of composers crafting specific music and "playing" specific architecture the way we quibble over algorithms in different circuits?

Fascinating question, thanks for cracking my head open a bit.