Hi all,

I spend a lot of time thinking about the "how" of reverbs. Tonight, I am more interested in the "what" and "why." Specifically:

- What are your favorite reverbs?
- And, why are those your favorite reverbs? What is it about the sound of those reverbs, or the experience of those reverbs, that makes them your favorites?

A few suggested ground rules for the discussion:

- The reverb can be ANY reverb possible. Plugin, hardware, physical space, a dream, a memory, a favorite song, a reverb that doesn't exist yet. Think big. You don't have to own it, or have owned it, but you need to have experienced it.

- No Valhalla DSP reverbs, please. I would like this to be a marketing/spin free zone, and am thus removing my plugins from this discussion. I want to keep the discussion about the WHY of reverbs, as opposed to discussions of one brand versus another.

- One anecdote per post. You can post as many reverb experiences as you like, but I would ask that you separate your experiences into different posts. Think of this as "small plates." This is a tapas/izakaya thread, with the goal to make each post easily digestible, leaving room for more.

- No debating. This is about YOUR favorite reverb experiences. No one can take away YOUR reverb experience. It is YOURS.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and comments!

Sean Costello

I'm going to start things off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbWNZkoQHuE

This was my first R-rated movie that I saw in a theater. The Cinerama in Seattle, in 70 mm 6-track Dolby. As awesome as this film is, seeing it on a HUGE screen, with the sounds coming from all directions, and the spinner sounds moving from front to back, blew my 12 yo mind.

Lexicon 224 reverb. Concert Hall setting.

Sean Costello

A more recent example:



This is the Graduate Reading Room at the Suzzalo Library, University of Washington. It is a designated quiet study room. Every single rustle of a turned page generated the most beautiful reflection pattern. Every creaking chair filled the space. The books I "accidentally" dropped created perfect hall reverb responses, and earned me some SERIOUS glares from my wife, who knew exactly what I was doing.

This is more a "reverb of the imagination," as opposed to an actual reverb. Making sounds loud enough to hear the real reverb response would have got me kicked out of the library, and I need to be able to go into the library to read nerdy DSP papers. Still, in my mind...what a sound.

Sean Costello

Your posts reminded me of an article I read about 7 months ago about the sound design of Guild Wars 2. http://www.arena.net/blog/video-audio-team-field-recording-t rip

I especially liked the impulse recordings of the defunct nuclear steam towers (the real fun starts around 43 seconds in)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjK_wI0xhw

The slapback on the tunnel is really trippy too. They intrigue me because they sound nothing like spaces I'm used to, but real at the same time.

The first time I heard the snare reverb on Paul Simon's The Boxer, (@ 1:03) I HAD to know how it was done. In my giant Koss headphones, HUGE to a nine year old. The contrast was staggering! Twenty years later I found out it was a speaker in the elevator shaft of the CBS building where they recorded "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Engineers are born, not made!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj7ZkkA6O9o&feature=fvsr

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

edit

UAD EMT_140 Plate B set at "0" reverb time.
I call it the "no reverb reverb"
There is no tail, makes my guitar sound big, warm, in your face, floating in "free space" (no room is felt just endless openness)

Softube Tsar-1
Very dark and dense.
Great for relaxed Jazz mixes.
Again with minimal tail, just the right ambiance to put all the instruments "in the room"

The Taj Mahal was an awesome experience, even though I was prepared having previously listened to Paul Horn recordings. Reflections going on and on with such clarity. The surfaces are very hard but smooth, some curved and some very angular. There were kind of dividing partitions that were thick stone lattice, designed I guess to let light in.
Last edited by fateamenabletochange on Tue May 01, 2012 9:32 pm; edited 1 time in total

I have the 1st Paul Horn album, but my guess is that this was recorded in mono. Can you describe the spatial characteristics of being in the actual Taj Mahal? Does the reverb end up coming from all directions, or just certain locations?

Sean Costello

Was quite a while ago. Within that space there were lots of different areas. People were drawn naturally to the main dome area, where the repeating echoes were most exaggerated. I probably know a bit more about reverb than I did back then, so can't really answer your questions, but I do remember thinking how complex the sound and structure inside was.
We went numbers of different times, trying for the quieter times.
Obviously it was mostly tourists there, and mostly Indian tourists, and not a reverb fanatic among them when we were there I am sure, but, ordinary folk do get really excited about the sound reflections there...whoooa, what the *** is this ?, much laughter and wonder.

The sound you get when you yell/clap through a pine forest of not too densely spaced trees with snow covering everything. There is this eerie haunting calming sound of dampened silence in between the sounds as it bounces around the forest. This is an unforgettable feeling/sound for anyone who has ever gone skiing in a gladed tree run that is on the harder steeper side, sometimes in a bowl/gulley valley on an angled terrain. You can hear every crunch of snow dissipate through the woods and change downwards in pitch as you descend to the bottom of the trail back to the ski lift. Sometime the person you are skiing with gets way ahead of you and you both call for each other. The way the sounds bounce around, it leaves his position ominous and you don't quite know where his location is by sound alone. Anyone else know this feeling?

Absolutely! Reminds me of many powder days in the Wasatch. I don't think I've ever heard a reverb capture that sound, but my perception of it is probably skewed by the euphoria of floating through waist-deep powder.

The last free version of AriesVerb.
Very flexible, capable not only of reverbs. Very CPU friendly.

Blows my head off. Especially on glitch/noise sources.

Would really like to know Sean's opinion on this plugin.

When I was a young kid in big public swimming pools, me and a friend would take a digital watch and make the alarm and beeping sounds come from it. We would be on opposite sides of the pool, and both go under water and make our watches beep. We mostly did this too see how many other swimmers we could freak out or annoy, but we would both go under water at the same time and see each other do operating the watches. It did have this sort of delay but the sound was always kind of "in your ear/face", and we use to just see if we could get reactions out of anyone in the pool, because we knew that sound had this funny warped but present reaction under water. It is after all a sound going through a space, whether it be gas,liquid, or solid? We did as well learn you can make a sound through the use of gas under water as well