Episode: 2104
Title: HPR2104: Basic Audio Production: Reverb
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2104/hpr2104.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:20:44

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This in HPR episode 2,104 entitled, Basic Audio Production, Reverb.
It is hosted by Acho Daudi and is about 24 minutes long.
The summary is a very basic description of the Reverb Effect.
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Hi folks, this is Naturalty one more time and with our podcast for you guys in Hacker Public Radio.
This time I'm going to discuss the end of my series on audio production.
By now I've covered equalization and compression.
The third element that will finish the basics of audio production would be reverb.
I'm going to give a very brief overview because as usual, as I've said in other chapters,
there's a lot of information in the internet so you can then deepen in the special areas you are interested in once you got the basics.
And again, like I said in the other podcasts, I think it's an item of general culture.
I would think to have knowing a bit about the guts of audio production.
So what is reverb about what are we going to discuss today?
Well, the 50,000-feet explanation of reverb, the way to describe it in layman terms.
The elevator pitch of reverb, 30 seconds definition, is like adding a sort of an echo to the tracks.
I still remember the first demos I made with the computer when I was getting started in home recording.
Everything was right but everything sounds very dry, very in your face, very harsh to listen to.
I discovered that it was due to the lack of reverb.
In nature, natural spaces, sounds produce echoes and sound bounces against different surfaces and bounces back into your ear and divides.
But when you're recording into a computer, you are in front of a microphone and everything is like straight forward.
Analog sound waves that you produce with your voice or with your musical instruments get digitized.
And I guess all those factors are what make that sound sounds very unnatural to the human hearing.
Or even sometimes you are producing the sounds with the computer itself, so it's completely synthetic.
I guess that's why synthesizers are called synthesized as connotations of something artificial.
Although synthesizers, it does it's like parameters to get the sound it wants, but that's a different matter.
So reverb is a short, the short for short work for reverberation.
We are with this reverb thing we are going to imitate what the way sounds work in nature.
When a sound gets into your ear, like I say, it reverberates, it bounces against a lot of things before getting back to us and that's part of the richness and the complexity of sound.
So what are we going to use this reverb for in all your production?
Well first, like I said, to make our tracks feel more natural.
By using different kinds of reverbs, we can make for example a track come closer, make it feel like it's closer to us.
Or the other way around we can make something feel like listen far in the distance.
So the amount of energy, the amount of sonic vibration you have is limited.
Part of the fun of audio production is the way you decide to share that sounds among different instruments.
And the reverberation helps you achieve that.
Maybe an instrument is like stealing a spotlight to either one, you can bring it to somewhere else or all kinds of crazy effects.
Also one of the main uses of reverb, at least in the generous side, I know one and I think the generous side usually play.
But I think it's the same for all kinds of music. It's what it's called production, the reverb loop.
It's a way in which you blend the tracks that maybe have been produced in very different devices or even by different people, etc.
By applying a common reverb effect to all the tracks, you get them to sound like more within the same space.
It would be the equivalent to in a visual program, like I used Gimp and MT paint.
So what you do with a blur effect, where you sometimes you need, you are using two images from two different places.
You want them to blend together better, you use some kind of blur.
The sonic equivalent, like I say, would be using this reverb loop.
That makes the tracks work as a whole instead of otherwise they sound like disjointed, no matter how good it is.
The song, how well composed and how much all the care you've put in the arrangements, you still need a way to that they feel together.
And a great way to achieve that cohesion is through reverb.
There are other ways, other things you can try, but the glue reverb is a very useful and also in fact it's a resource that it's very nice in terms of the effort it takes you.
And the results you get ILA short after I record all the tracks that my song is going to have.
I like to apply a reverb maybe with random parameters, but just to feel, to get a feel for the first time for the song as a whole.
Because yeah, the reverb immediately brings like the sum to more to life, makes everything come together.
So, well, there's a little bit about reverb that I'm not going to cover here.
It's like an introduction, another view and to tell the truth, I'm an expert I've been for a very long time.
I've just used the default reverb that came with our door.
It was in my district, it was a played reverb and I never, I never, it worked just fine for me and I'm always, I always prefer being recording stuff and trying to find new plugins.
So, for a long, long time I just used that reverb, but I'm going to give the general parameters that I think I can be applicable to all the reverbs in general.
Although some of them maybe can have more complex options, naturally, but in general the parameters that you will find in all reverbs are first the room size.
Room size, it's pretty self explanatory, I think.
When you know that room is not, it's literally thinking of a room of a house.
What you control with the room size is the room, the size of the room you are supposedly in,
the room that the computer is emulating.
So, what difference does it make?
Well, the smaller is the room, the quicker you are going to listen to the reverberation because the sound will take less time to go and then come back.
So, a small room, if you imagine a small room that is empty of any furniture, if you clap, you are going to instantly listen to the echo against the walls.
On the other extreme, it would be, for example, a casserole.
If you get a humongous room size, the sound will take a long time to get back to you, so it's a very characteristic sound.
The casserole is an example, obviously, the scenario in your music for a casserole is limited, but this kind of long echoes in the distance can be very useful.
In some sounds, you get some intuition on when you need a short and quick reverberation when you need something that takes longer.
So, another parameter would be the decay, which is a number of milliseconds, as the tail of the sound lasts.
This one, I don't think I can explain it better.
You get a feel of it by playing with the values. If you make a decay very short, maybe for what I remember, you're going to lose the reverb because it doesn't take enough to be heard.
The best way to get that feeling for what decay can do is just experimenting.
Another parameter that's very interesting is dumping.
Dumping emulates the absorption of sound by the objects.
Besides what I mentioned before, the room size and a factor in real life that can change your results and how echo comes through,
is if the objects, the sound stumbles upon.
Typically, the objects absorb more high frequency than low.
And you can emulate these behavior of objects with the damping parameter.
It's useful to have some damping sometimes because it makes the sound feel more natural.
Otherwise, sometimes you get some ringing sound, some artifacts that you don't want in your productions.
Also, I think depending on the kind of objects that you find in the room, one's logically absorbed more sounds than others.
It's not the same having racks on the floor, I don't know, a metal wall or concrete.
So you can experiment with that kind of damping parameters.
Some plugins, I think, have two knobs or more knobs, one for high frequencies,
damping in high frequencies and damping in low frequencies.
And also, depending on the music, it's good to remember to regarding all these parameters that you don't have always to emulate nature.
Maybe my tendency is to think that way because of the music I do.
I like my music too.
I like generally rock, maybe a bit of jazz.
And I like the music to sound similar to what a band could do.
But I also enjoy and admire things that are products of sound engineering
that are things that couldn't be real in nature.
So that's another possibility about reverb.
You're not limited to what you can do in real world.
You can invent new stuff.
In the end, the only rule is your creativity and your aesthetic intent and your sensitivity.
So, well, that's a side note.
I have one more parameter that I'd like to comment.
It's a drive versus wet.
This is a parameter that you can find in a lot of plugins.
It's not exclusive to reverb.
It's a drive versus wet.
It's a proportion.
In between how much of the track is the original track, the track without the effect,
without the reverb in this case, how much is the track with the reverb effect.
So, for example, a track with 100% dry would have no reverb audible.
And a track with 100% wet would sound like a cavern or like a dungeon, something very extreme.
A funny thing you can do with this with dry and wet also is that you can, for example,
you can find the dry track and the wet track in different ways to get different effects.
For example, you can record a guitar track that sounds dry on the left here.
And it's made it's reverb track, the same track, but with reverb sounding only on the right here.
And you can get different effects with that.
With that, what you are doing there is building 3D spaces by using the echo effects.
So, again, there's no hard rules.
It's about creativity and crazy ideas that you can have and you can test it in the computer.
That's a great thing of the magic of audio production.
Yeah, well, those are, I think, the basic parameters of all present in all reverbs.
Maybe the simplest one, maybe on hot damping or dry versus wet.
I'd like to also mention briefly that there are two, well, there are more than two,
but the two main kinds of reverbs that exist are plates and spring reverbs.
There are more of them.
Like I said, I was always stuck happily with a plate reverb and never gave a thought to it,
but it seems there are subtle differences in the way they sound and what are their use cases.
So, both of them, their names, the origin of their names, has to do with the way those reverbs were produced before the computer age.
They take advantage that the fact that sound travels very, very, very quickly through a through metal.
So, both in plate and spring, the sound travels through a through a metal surface.
And that sound created the reverberation.
The reverberation was another to the mix.
But it's pretty much all I can say about the kind of reverb I just try them and tinker around.
And if I like the sound, I stick to it.
And otherwise I try something different.
I don't have a mental division very clear about plates and spring reverbs.
And also, there are other kinds like convolution, reverb and all the stuff.
It's a bit over my head.
So, I cannot say anything about that except that it exists.
So, well, I think that's all I have for you today, regarding reverb.
I hope you have maybe got more or two nuggets of knowledge there.
And this ends my audio trilogy.
Again, to sum up, I covered equalization and high and low pass filter, then compression.
And today I covered reverb.
Those three effects are like what you use 90% of time in everything you do around a digital audio or station.
Well, maybe also distortion is useful, for example, in guitars, of course.
But also, if you want to accentuate a voice track or a hit in a drum, it's distortion can be useful too.
But mostly these three are like the red and butter, I think it's expression.
Of audio production.
I hope you...
Another thing I'd like to remark is that, of course, one thing is knowing these concepts.
Another is like recognizing them.
And having the neck to see what's the use case for each of them.
That's something that comes with practice and no one can give you.
You need to train your ear and sometimes go through quite a lot of frustration, at least in my case,
because it's something that I'm not natural for this audio production stuff at all.
I would rather be composing or playing, I think I've said it in other podcasts.
But I would skill to have.
And anyway, the fun in this kind of stuff is precisely when you start to recognize this,
what I would need to do here is like, hey, I want this, this voices to feel like father.
Hey, then I would like to do this, chase the room size, and then adjust EQ.
And you do it, and it works, and it's like, hey, it's a great feeling.
You know, when the thing you had in your head finally translates to a real world,
it's something great through...
It was rather of trial and error, but the final result is always great.
So to me, it's a great hobby, and I don't know if all the people will feel that way.
But I find it very relaxing.
And the technology makes it so we see nowadays that I really recommend that,
at least you give it a try.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
See you in new chapters.
Thank you very much for listening, bye.
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