What is the difference between plate and spring reverb

Posts: 4, I just prefer it. I learned to play through an old Blues Jr from sometime in the 90s, so that's what I like. My favorite reverb I know no one is going to agree with me on this is that deep, ringing, cave-like reverb you get out of a Vox. I don't really use reverb pedals. I try to make sure the amp has reverb built in, but if I have one that doesn't like my Bassbreaker , for example I tend to just use my DD3 and fake it as best I can.

JDB2 likes this. Nov 25, 9. Posts: 29, I learned on spring reverb being into surf guitar, but as I ventured into other music I eventually found a "room" reverb that seems very versatile and now I use that if the amp does not have spring reverb. Nov 25, Posts: 3, Nov 26, For guitar pedals, I prefer delay overall. Of the reverb families, I actually like non-linear room reverb best. Spring is the more classic guitar sound.

I have used an EMT sheet reverb and prefer it over any spring reverb for guitar. The real EMT is stellar to say the least. For a digital pedal emulation, it would depend on the pedal as some have better plate emulations than spring emulations and vice versa.

I would use any of them, but would still reach for my Echoplex first for time based effects. I can get some killer verb out of an Echoplex. I've never ventured away from a traditional long spring reverb tank since my amps have all had them. Never tried a pedal 'verb for that reason. Closest I've come is messing with a friend's delay pedal. Age: 51 Posts: 17, Spring, plate, room, hall-I use each of them depending on the application.

Same with guitars and amps. One size does not fit all in my world. Talisman made me a plate reverb believer. The ones I'd encountered before that were generic and lacked features. 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. It's great for drums and stringed instruments at higher levels, and at lower levels on the more prominent instruments in a mix. Chamber verbs refer to the chamber reverberation created in studios with the budget and space to build their own rooms for this purpose.

You can compare them to room reverb but with less build up of coloration to help maintain transparency. They also focus more on the thickness of the tail while keeping the early reflections thinner. These were designed to be transparent and you can think of them as a more neutral option.

They take less post-processing work to deal with but impart less of their own characteristics. It's useful to use on vocals, lead guitar, and any of the more prominent tracks in a mix. Hall is the shorter way of saying 'concert hall,' which are big spaces designed to have a pleasing acoustic environment. 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.

The density swells in the tail as opposed to building up in the early energy. You typically hear these on the type of mixes you'd expect, for orchestras, solo piano, or singer-songwriter types of songs. Mix engineers have taken to using them on slower songs like ballads and anything else with a more sparse arrangement.

You can think of a cathedral reverb as a longer, more wet hall verb. 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. This leads to their longer decay times as high as 10 seconds. 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.

Avoid in on high tempo songs with fast, rhythmic elements and use it more on slow, melodic tracks. The name is fitting, so try to stay in that wheel house. If you see mention of cave or stadium reverbs, they're like cathedral ones but with more of a slapback delay added.

This type of reverb has a very short decay tail almost non-existent around 0. It's mostly comprised of early reflections that very faithful to the original sound. It adds very little character or color, being as dry as possible. It smooths out the audio and is over so quickly many listeners won't notice it's there. Ambience reverb is typically used on a bus to push entire groups of tracks or the whole song through it. This provides a sense of glue , meaning that it subtly makes all of the instrumentation sound like it actually belongs together and was recorded in the same acoustic environment.

Mechanical reverbs refer to the two types we invented that let us create the effect without needing an entire room to do it. It allowed us to tweak the characteristics to a degree. They eventually became smaller and cheaper over time, though the first ones to hit the market weighed up to pounds like the Abbey Road Studios' EMT Plate reverbs are created by vibrating a metal sheet like you would a speaker cone and recording the result.

They can have short, medium, or long decay times but almost always have a very fast attack in terms of the early reflections which are high in energy. They're dark but the initial energy can be fairly bright. When I think of plate verbs I always think about the most popular Pink Floyd albums. They have an eerie, dark atmosphere to them even though some of the songs are melodically beautiful and uplifting.

This is because they recorded with that big lb. Spring reverbs are created by vibrating a spring just like a plate. They have a short to medium length decay, are fairly dark, and have a metallic character to them. Physical springs can be found in guitar amplifiers still, though it's becoming more rare. Mechanical springs had problems associated with their movement, and even though digital springs lack those problems, they still go largely unused, because they aren't that pleasing, to be honest.

The problem is if they're bumped they emit an atrocious thundering sound and they don't sound that great in general. These include your typical VST plugins for your digital audio workstation , reverb effects pedals, and built-in synthesizer modules. Convolution reverbs consist of an actual recording of an acoustic space as a sample, which is then analyzed and a frequency profile is created of them.

Plate reverb is synthetic, and our ear knows this! Depending on the material, sometimes the most outlandish and unusual sounds are the perfect fit for the track. If you mix from a template, for instance, you might already have chamber, hall, room, and plates set up and ready to go, adding a bit of each to taste as you mix. Plates are great to blend with other reverbs, because they have a totally different quality from a dedicated space. On a totally dry track, you can pick a space, like a room or hall, and then augment that with plate instead of another room.

Think about it on drums. Cheesy rhymes aside, plate reverb is an excellent tool for a variety of purposes. Plate Reverb Explained Plate reverb was one of the first types of synthetic reverb to be developed.