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Logic's platinumverb plug-in contains all the essential parts on any modern digital reverb

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Reverb is the product of sound interacting with nature. Every time we make a noise, it's transmitted as waves of vibration through the air. These waves ricochet off every surface they encounter, before finding their way to the listener's ears. Check out our reverb masterclass tutorial if you want some nuts-and-bolts pointers, or read on for a more in-depth look.

Because we're so used to hearing these sonic reflections, any situation in which there's nothing for the sound to bounce off sounds unnatural. With this in mind, successive generations of music productions have used a variety of ingenious processes to recreate these reflections, culminating (for most of us) in digital reverb units in the shape of plug-ins.

There's never been a better time to explore the possibilities your reverb plug-ins throw up, which makes it all the more surprising that the vast majority of us do little more than call up our favourite reverb and insert it into any channel we need. This is a real shame, as almost every space you encounter will have a distinct sonic character.

Clever use of reverb techniques can transform your mix from a lifeless lump of deadwood to a vibrant masterpiece.

Reverb types

Spring
In the pre-digital age, the only way to synthesize the sound of reverberation was by mechanical means, and this generally meant spring or plate reverb. Spring reverb is a simple concept; usually found inside analogue guitar amps, it involves suspending springs between pairs of transducers with vibrations being generated at one end and received at the other. The effect, while interesting and often useful, is fairly unrealistic, and the vast amount of gain required to boost the received signal makes it prone to extreme signal noise.

Plate
Plate reverb is similar in principle to spring reverb, in that real vibrations are induced in a real piece of metal by a driver and then picked up by microphones. The difference is in the quality of results; plate reverbs can sound absolutely lush (albeit in a not-quite-natural way). Originally the preserve of top-end studios, they're surprisingly cheap and easy to build, although with an average size of 4ft x 6ft, they aren't exactly practical.

Digital
Although this is a slightly oversimplified description, let's just say that digital reverb is usually achieved with a combination of very fast delay algorithms and filters. If you've ever wondered why reverbs are among the most processor-intensive effects you can use, then you must not know that to create even a modest sounding digital reverb, said algorithms must churn out anywhere from 1000 to 3000 delays every second. And they must impart clever randomisations of timing between each one so that the effect isn't completely unnatural.

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