Art acoustic reverb presets
It's mostly comprised of early reflections that very faithful to the original sound. This type of reverb has a very short decay tail (almost non-existent around 0.5 seconds). If you see mention of cave or stadium reverbs, they're like cathedral ones but with more of a slapback delay added. The name is fitting, so try to stay in that wheel house. Avoid in on high tempo songs with fast, rhythmic elements and use it more on slow, melodic tracks. They are very light on the early reflections and energy and more in the build up, leading to a thick smearing or blurring of sounds. This leads to their longer decay times (as high as 10 seconds).
This is based less on the size of a cathedral versus a concert hall and more of the highly reflective, less scattering material used when building them, and their typically more square or rectangular shapes. You can think of a cathedral reverb as a longer, more wet hall verb. Mix engineers have taken to using them on slower songs like ballads and anything else with a more sparse arrangement. You typically hear these on the type of mixes you'd expect, for orchestras, solo piano, or singer-songwriter types of songs. The density swells in the tail as opposed to building up in the early energy. The decay tails are longer in the 2 second range and have a bit of a pre-delay bulit in so that the early reflections don't begin immediately. Hall is the shorter way of saying 'concert hall,' which are big spaces designed to have a pleasing acoustic environment. It's useful to use on vocals, lead guitar, and any of the more prominent tracks in a mix. They take less post-processing work to deal with but impart less of their own characteristics. These were designed to be transparent and you can think of them as a more neutral option. They also focus more on the thickness of the tail while keeping the early reflections thinner. You can compare them to room reverb but with less build up of coloration to help maintain transparency. ChamberĬhamber verbs refer to the chamber reverberation created in studios with the budget and space to build their own rooms for this purpose. It's great for drums and stringed instruments at higher levels, and at lower levels on the more prominent instruments in a mix. You'll notice a build up of low and low-middle frequencies, which will require some equalization if you use a lot of room reverb. Room verbs feature a thick density of echoes that add coloration and warmth to a track, like a real small room would do. They have a short decay tail (0.75 seconds or so) and are more heavy on the early reflections. They're used to create the intimate and typical sound we're used to hearing throughout our time spent indoors. When we say room, we're referring to small rooms the size of a bedroom or living room. Some studios in the old days even went as far as to create their own reverb rooms. Acoustic Reverbs Chamber reverberatorĪcoustic reverbs refer to chamber reverberators, which is a fancy way of saying "rooms of various size." We discovered that the size, shape, and material of the walls all affected the characteristics of the reverb.
It's a good mental schema to remember based on how they're created (or were originally created, since we're all mainly using digital reverbs now). We'll follow the convention of separating these into three main groups, which are acoustic, mechanical, and digital. We've covered that before in our article Mixing with Reverb, and if you're here as a mixer you should definitely open that up to read next.
ART ACOUSTIC REVERB PRESETS HOW TO
I also want to mention that, while I'll be discussing each type, its characteristics, and when to use them that I won't be going in-depth on how to use them. If you want to the background story, check out our article What is Reverb? If you're reading this then you probably already understand what this effect is and how it arises in nature or is created acoustically, mechanically, through electronics, or through digital algorithms. I do agree there's only three main categories, but anyone looking to fully explain the topic can't limit the discussion to five or seven types of reverb, which is what always happens.