OK here's a interesting article all about reverb and it's again a really good read ..
- espiecally for beginners/noobs with no musical history.
Reverb, Echo and Delay..
Echo was a beautiful nymph in Greek mythology with a musical voice who was employed by Zeus to distract Hera with incessant babbling, gibbering and gossip while he embarked on sexual adventures with his many paramours unhindered.
Hera, driven half insane by her inane jabbering, lost patience, took the power of speech away from Echo and removed her from Olympus. All Echo could do after this was to repeat the last words that anyone had said to her. After falling in love and being spurned by Narcissus, she rejected the advances of Pan, who was willing to overlook her affliction, and who in a fit of pique smashed her into tiny pieces and scattered her all over the world. She can now be heard by anyone who raises their voice.
Reverb is essentially echo where the reflections are so close together that the results are perceived as a single sound. Reverberations, simulated or otherwise, are an integral part in the recording process, in live performance and also in our very perception of our surroundings. A few years ago, I had occasion to be in a 97% anechoic chamber at Paisley University's Ayr campus, and I can testify that it does not necessarily feel like a friendly nor welcoming place to be. Your eyes tell your brain that you're standing in a room that is fifteen feet by ten, while your ears are telling the brain that you're in a coffin with two inches of space around you. The results can feel almost nausea inducing to someone unfamiliar with them. It takes a little time to become acclimatised to this environment.
In a mix or a live performance, reverb will be used to make a vocal or instrumental performance sound more polished and to fit nicely into the mix giving an impression of depth and space. Delays and echoes can be used to give more life to parts or tracks in a mix, or to create a dramatic stereo image. Used in conjunction with panning, delays can be used to help create artificial Doppler effects, one of my favourite techniques for adding a bit of theatrics to a mix. Used cleverly in a mix, delay can be subtle enough that it is not obvious when swallowed by the rest of the instruments and be used just to change the feel of a track by giving it life and space, or it can simply over used to give a dramatic edge to an instrumental part.
Reverb and echo are often associated with religious or spiritual connotations. Churches have been built since the middle ages with dramatic acoustic properties in mind. Religious Choirs and Orchestras tend to perform in large echoic chambers with reflective surfaces. In the 1980's television series "Robin Of Sherwood" delay and large reverberations were employed to give Herne the Hunter's voice ethereal power and to give a demonic and sinister edge to some of the evil characters like the devil worshiping Baron de Beleme as he summoned the spirit Aziel.
Echo appears to have been employed for religious reasons even before the construction of the dramatic medieval Cathedrals. The Aztecs, with certain of their pyramids, seemingly designed buildings to use reflections in creating sound effects. If you clap your hands in front of the 1,100 year old Temple of Kukulcan, in the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza and the pyramid answers in the voice of the sacred quetzal bird.
In the 20th Century, with the dramatic rise of recorded music in popular culture, reverberations have been simulated using tiled rooms, springs, plates with transducers attached to them and now in the modern era digital computer algorithms. The main advantages of the latter are two fold and diametrically opposite to each other.
A digital reverb can be used to produce far more realistic simulations than springs or plates, with total user control over the pre delay time, the decay, the colour of the reverberations, and the diffusion. In fact, with digital technology, real rooms can be modeled using convolving reverbs that work with impulse responses that are generated by recording staccato broad band signals and the corresponding reflections, which can then be used to model the effects of the same room on other signals. The other and opposite advantage of digital reverb is its ability to create rooms that could not exist in real life. Rooms with virtually no pre delay or with infinitely long decay times can be generated with digital reverbs.
More to come......
- espiecally for beginners/noobs with no musical history.
Reverb, Echo and Delay..
Echo was a beautiful nymph in Greek mythology with a musical voice who was employed by Zeus to distract Hera with incessant babbling, gibbering and gossip while he embarked on sexual adventures with his many paramours unhindered.
Hera, driven half insane by her inane jabbering, lost patience, took the power of speech away from Echo and removed her from Olympus. All Echo could do after this was to repeat the last words that anyone had said to her. After falling in love and being spurned by Narcissus, she rejected the advances of Pan, who was willing to overlook her affliction, and who in a fit of pique smashed her into tiny pieces and scattered her all over the world. She can now be heard by anyone who raises their voice.
Reverb is essentially echo where the reflections are so close together that the results are perceived as a single sound. Reverberations, simulated or otherwise, are an integral part in the recording process, in live performance and also in our very perception of our surroundings. A few years ago, I had occasion to be in a 97% anechoic chamber at Paisley University's Ayr campus, and I can testify that it does not necessarily feel like a friendly nor welcoming place to be. Your eyes tell your brain that you're standing in a room that is fifteen feet by ten, while your ears are telling the brain that you're in a coffin with two inches of space around you. The results can feel almost nausea inducing to someone unfamiliar with them. It takes a little time to become acclimatised to this environment.
In a mix or a live performance, reverb will be used to make a vocal or instrumental performance sound more polished and to fit nicely into the mix giving an impression of depth and space. Delays and echoes can be used to give more life to parts or tracks in a mix, or to create a dramatic stereo image. Used in conjunction with panning, delays can be used to help create artificial Doppler effects, one of my favourite techniques for adding a bit of theatrics to a mix. Used cleverly in a mix, delay can be subtle enough that it is not obvious when swallowed by the rest of the instruments and be used just to change the feel of a track by giving it life and space, or it can simply over used to give a dramatic edge to an instrumental part.
Reverb and echo are often associated with religious or spiritual connotations. Churches have been built since the middle ages with dramatic acoustic properties in mind. Religious Choirs and Orchestras tend to perform in large echoic chambers with reflective surfaces. In the 1980's television series "Robin Of Sherwood" delay and large reverberations were employed to give Herne the Hunter's voice ethereal power and to give a demonic and sinister edge to some of the evil characters like the devil worshiping Baron de Beleme as he summoned the spirit Aziel.
Echo appears to have been employed for religious reasons even before the construction of the dramatic medieval Cathedrals. The Aztecs, with certain of their pyramids, seemingly designed buildings to use reflections in creating sound effects. If you clap your hands in front of the 1,100 year old Temple of Kukulcan, in the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza and the pyramid answers in the voice of the sacred quetzal bird.
In the 20th Century, with the dramatic rise of recorded music in popular culture, reverberations have been simulated using tiled rooms, springs, plates with transducers attached to them and now in the modern era digital computer algorithms. The main advantages of the latter are two fold and diametrically opposite to each other.
A digital reverb can be used to produce far more realistic simulations than springs or plates, with total user control over the pre delay time, the decay, the colour of the reverberations, and the diffusion. In fact, with digital technology, real rooms can be modeled using convolving reverbs that work with impulse responses that are generated by recording staccato broad band signals and the corresponding reflections, which can then be used to model the effects of the same room on other signals. The other and opposite advantage of digital reverb is its ability to create rooms that could not exist in real life. Rooms with virtually no pre delay or with infinitely long decay times can be generated with digital reverbs.
More to come......
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