Reverb

The effect of an abrupt sound dying away gradually, as if played in a medium-to-large space with hard, reflective walls such as a ballroom, concert hall, or cave. Today, most reverb used in recorded music is produced electronically, by digital devices that employ various mathematical methods. In the past, several electromechanical methods have been used including:

• Echo chamber: a room with hard floors, walls, and ceiling placed at odd angles determined by mathematical formulas. A signal is fed into the room via a loudspeaker, and the reverb picked up by one or more microphones placed in the room. Known for producing good-sounding reverb, but very expensive to do properly. Probably the best known installation was a Capital Records, which built no fewer than eight echo chambers (designed by Les Paul) 30 feet underground beneath its Los Angeles studios. This article describes some well-known echo chambers.
• Plate reverb: the signal is injected into a large metal plate via a transducer at one edge. The signal reflects internally within the plate, producing the reverb, which is picked up by other transducers along the other edges. Heavily used by recording studios in the 1970s, but expensive.
• Spring reverb: the signal is injected into one end of a metal spring by a transducer, and picked up by a transducer at the other end. Widely used in guitar amplifiers, organs, and some modular synthesizers. Spring reverbs are notorious for their rather unnatural-sounding reverberation, and for producing "boing" sounds if the spring unit is physically disturbed. But prior to the advent of inexpensive digital reverb units, they were the only reasonable means of producing reverb on a budget.
• Tape echo units were widely used in the 1960s and 1970s to provide "slapback" echo, which can sound like reverb.

Reverb is usually produced electronically using a combination of delay lines of different time lengths, and filtering. An alternative approach is to use convolution to impose the response characteristics of an electromechanical method on a digital signal.

History

Tape echo

The first tape echo units were manufactured by Ikutaro Kakehashi's Ace Tone in the 1960s, such as the Ace Tone Echo Chamber EC-1. Kakehashi's Roland Corporation continued manufacturing tape echo units, such as the Roland RE-100 Echo Chamber in 1973 and the Roland RE-201 Space Echo in 1974.

Gated reverb

Gated reverb was introduced in 1979 by Japanese band Yellow Magic Ochestra, who first used it for the snare drums in the 1979 version of their debut album Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978) and then the hit song "Behind the Mask" (1979). YMO drummer Yukihiro Takahashi also used gated reverb drums for his solo album Murdered by the Music (1980), Susan's "Screamer" (1980), and with YMO for Live at Budokan 1980.

Drummer Phil Collins and producer Hugh Padgham began using the gated reverb technique in 1980. They famously used it on Collins' snare drum on Peter Gabriel's "Intruder" (1980).

Gated reverb drums were subsequently used in the majority of pop songs produced during the mid-to-late 1980s.