A lower setting will sound darker, and a higher setting will sound brighter. This setting will alter the timbre of the room you are simulating. This parameter might be labeled as Hi/Low Cut, as EQ, or as Tone on a given reverb effect. A short decay simulates a room that is more dead (fewer reverberations) and a longer decay simulates a very live sounding room, with many reverberations before the effect dies out. This setting determines for how long the reverb effect lasts. You can experiment with your mix setting to get a nice reverb sound while preserving some of the direct signal for clarity. Depending on what you're going for a signal that's too wet might be a bit much. Turning the mix or level all the way up means you're sending completely wet signal-all reverb, no dry. Zero or 'off' setting means your signal is dry-no reverb is being added. Mix, sometimes labeled 'level' on pedals, is the ratio of the two. In dealing with audio signal and effects we refer to "dry" and "wet" signal, where dry is the direct sound from your pickup with nothing added and wet is the resulting sound from an effect. How loud the reverb effect is compared to your dry signal is defined by your mix setting.
The next three parameters can be found on most reverb effect pedals as well as on software reverb plugins. Pre-delay control isn't available on most reverb effects pedals or in most multi-fx processor units. Using that as a reference, you can then set your pre-delay to define your distance from a reverberating space. Sound waves travel through air at approximately 1 foot per millisecond. Pre-delay is measured in milliseconds (ms), which is thousands of a second. We're not talking about a lot of time here. It simulates a distance between you as the sound source and the space that is reverberating by adding a brief period of time before the reverb washes. The Parameters of the Reverb Pre-DelayĪdding a pre-delay pulls you forward in a mix by allowing your dry signal (the direct sound of your instrument) to come through before the reverb effect kicks in. In electric music, reverb is an effect we can apply to our signal to make it sound like we are playing in a real space. The distance from the sound source to reflecting surfaces, the physical makeup of those surfaces, and the relative angles of the sound waves and surfaces within the space create a particular acoustical effect that's unique to that space. In acoustics, reverb occurs when a sound hits surfaces and bounces off of them, creating an auditory sense of the space within the room. Watch our video on reverb basics and read on below to learn all about the parameters of reverb effects and how you can implement them in your playing using either a reverb effect pedal or within your software DAW. That's because their signal is made up of direct vibrations from the strings and instrument, and what they're hearing doesn't encompass the sort of sound reflections in an enclosed space they're used to hearing when they play acoustically.įor many, this first encounter is discouraging, but as we'll learn, using a pickup or a solid body violin, whether on stage or in recording applications, actually gives you even more control than ever over "acoustics" because we can create the sense of a space of any size, shape, and level of echo that we want using our most fundamental effect: reverb. Everything sounds very close up and direct. As a result, whenever acoustic players plug in for the first time, whether with a pickup or a solid body electric, they are often disappointed that their sound often lacks life and realism.
A big part of what people label as "good acoustics" owes to the reverberative properties of a given room or space. Everyone loves the sound of their instrument in a church, a recital hall, a stairwell, a tiled bathroom-pretty much any "live" space.