Recording - September 2016 - 60

By Paul J. Stamler

Part 20: Reverb
Conventionally reverb is applied to a recording as it's being mixed; the
mix elements that will have reverb added to them are chosen, and their Aux
Send knobs twirled to create a separate mix just to feed the reverb.
Depending on the console (and the reverb device-we'll get to that in a
minute), this mix may be done on a mono or a stereo Aux bus, the output of
which is fed (or routed in an in-the-box DAW mix) to the desired reverb
device, or devices, or DAW simulations of devices. The output of the reverb
device is usually patched to the line input of an unused console channel, or
routed to an unused DAW channel, or it automatically appears in the mix as
an Aux Return.
That's the way it usually works, and if I'd done this on the Ottoman
Underground session, this discussion would have appeared between my
DAW and Mix segments. However, when this series began, I promised to follow the sequence of what I actually did as much as possible (with a few
detours into the world of fiction, like the Overdubs article). I mixed the session
dry, meaning without reverb, because I wanted to add the reverb afterwards
in post-production, which would let me add whatever type and amount of
reverb I preferred. I'll go into the details when I talk about what I actually did.

Echo Chamber
This is really misnamed, because what it produces is not echo (a small number of discrete
bounces) but reverberation (many, many
bounces, combining into a wash of sound).
Here's the outline of how to build one.
First, allocate a decent-sized space in your
building-say, the size of a squash court. Build
out the walls and ceiling so there are no parallel
surfaces - those generate standing waves and
flutter echoes. Line the walls and ceiling with an
acoustically-reflective material (tile is used most
often). Put a loudspeaker toward one end of the
chamber (connected to a power amplifier that
can drive it), and put a microphone at the other
end (two microphones to create a stereo output).
Now, if you feed the speaker's power amp a
mix of the material to which you want to add

Dead-studio pop recordings were the norm for decades,
partly because building a live room or hall that sounds good
is both difficult and expensive.
One other thing before we start: my expectations of what you can do are
different this time. When I talked about mics, I figured you owned some or
were buying some soon. Ditto preamps and interfaces and a DAW. But
you're not going to buy an EMT plate reverb or an unused church (though I
know one that's for sale), or even build an echo chamber. So keep in mind
that as I describe what different sorts of hardware reverbs do, and how they
do it, you (and I) will probably be using the virtual versions, which are
affordable and great-sounding nowadays.
So, what kind of reverbs can we choose from?
Track in a reverberant space
This seems like a "well, duh", but for non-classical music (and a lot of classical music) it wasn't the norm for a long time. Maxfield and Harrison, the
two guys who developed the Western Electric electrical recording system
used by all the major labels, came back to the patent office a few months
later with their design for a studio which they thought would sound right for
music recording-and it was dead, dead, dead. Dead-studio pop recordings
were the norm for decades, partly because building a live room or hall that
sounds good is both difficult and expensive.
So for half a century it was the norm to record in a dead room, then add
reverberation artificially, in the mixing process. Often the record company
built an...
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RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2016

reverb, the speaker makes noise, which bounces
around the chamber and is picked up by the
mic(s). You'll feed the microphone signal into
your console and mix with the un-reverberated
signals (called dry signals, as I mentioned; logically, the reverberation is the wet signal).
It's very important to make the chamber
soundproof, so the mic(s) won't pick up noise
from the outside world. The famous chambers at
Capitol Records were constructed under the
building's parking lot, while the equally famous
chambers at EMI's Abbey Road studio were
sealed inside the building (an old London mansion), and the main chamber was as big as the
medium-sized studio where the Beatles worked.
None of its walls fronted on the outdoors. (There
was a separate room just for the racked power
amplifiers that drove the chamber's speakers.)
Speaking of Abbey Road, the book Recording
the Beatles reveals the fact that it was standard
practice to heavily filter the signal going to the
chamber; the engineers would chop off frequencies

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2016