Here's a thing to listen to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHp3x3CFmj0
Common Saints is the nom de studio of Charlie Perry, an Englishman, multi-instrumentalist and producer who just released his debut album, Cinema 3000, on Oct. 29th.
Good, wet fun!
I suppose Common Saints' genre is psychedelic soul music. On a practical level, it's what you'd get if Roger Waters was less interested in why the British education system screws people up and more interested in having tons of sex in a room lit with Moby’s lava lamp collection. On Idol Eyes, the chorus is “Wanna make love? Wanna get high?" Exactly. Cinema 3000 is the ultimate sexytime album, as well as the ultimate sleepytime album. Both. At the same time.
But that isn't to say the record is shallow. Rather, it's poetic and hopeful, all about good vibrations and not recriminations. This isn't Nu Metal, and why one has their issues. This is dinner with friends who are smart, nice, and upbeat, touching on ideas with a smile and some edibles and not wallowing in complicated soup with Nietzsche and Freud.
I love this record.
The songs are a strange mixture of hooks and dreaming, sometimes structured but often simply musical events happening over the same set of chord changes. And then something super-catchy happens. There's definitely a healthy dose of Pink Floyd and AIR in the recipe, but also a dollop of vintage soul music, especially in the sonics of the low, drums and vocals. Great bass lines abound. There are slick guitar solos that also sound off the cuff. And slide guitar. C'est La Vie is what would happen if the Rolling Stones decided to clean up the basement while working on 'Exiles on Main Street'.
And wonderful production. Mr. Perry records loosely but puts things together with infinite discipline. And he's a master of ambiance and reverberation. In fact, the record is a masterclass in what to do to make things wet without getting soaked.
Reverb and ambiance, the sound of it, the amount of it, is an instant clue as to the era in which the music was recorded. Nothing makes things sound dated like reverb. A trend on a lot of contemporary recordings is to evoke a past by using reverb... a lot of it. Often too much. Cinema 3000 is lush, thick with washes of ambiance, but it’s all used creatively and in really musical ways.
Some sound examples, cued up for you.
Check out infinite decay time on the end of this slide guitar lick
Here, Mr Perry uses vocal reverb to basically generate a pad. Notice how the reverb is phrased around the sections of the song. By the way, send this song to someone you’re romantically interested in, it’s as romantic, gorgeous and heartfelt.
Listen to how each part is in its own distinctive environment. Starting with the drums, which are in a boxy small room, and then each part comes in, enclosed in its own little reverb bubble, until the chorus, when the whole thing is suddenly in a zeppelin hangar.
All of these clips sound much better on a better streaming platform. The whole album is really really worth a listen.
Articles and Ideas
Highly inspired by Common Saints and with indirect sound in mind, I pulled together a bunch of ideas on using reverb, a few previous articles, a new one written just for this New Monday Episode, a bit of this and a bit of that.
Don’t Think of Reverb Acoustically - Luke’s thoughts on the matter.
Practical and Impractical Reverb - Dan’s thoughts on the matter.
Hearing Different Reverb Types
I'll leave you with this, from Cinema 3000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZSqc3uSYmg
Warm, fuzzy, somewhat hazy, trippy regards,
Luke
The first thing you can do is stop thinking of reverb as a ramification of physics.
Don't think of using reverb as an acoustic effect. Think about using it as an emotional effect, or a narrative effect. Lyrically, is the song set in the present or the past, or is it perhaps in both? Can reverb be used to differentiate the past from the present, or the present from the future? What does the past sound like? Is the future wet or dry? When the singer is in their head, what does that sound like? What is the reverb of thoughts?
Is the character in different spaces during the song? Is there a bedroom, or a kitchen? Is the character in one place during the verse and another place during the chorus? This might be something you decide that's not based on the lyrics. It can just be a decision you make.
Control the sense of space and intimacy. Reverb is distance. Want a vocal part to sound like it's in the listeners' ear? Dry it up and pan it hard. Control the depth of the soundstage by putting some things farther away than others. What's in the back of the room? What's in your face? Make decisions, damnit!
The listener probably will never go, "Ah, the singer is in the bedroom in their past, then dreams they're in a canyon, then they yell in a bathroom." And honestly, you don't want your listener noticing all that stuff, that would be like watching an old Godzilla movie hoping to see the strings moving everything. But you do want your listener to "lose" themself in the song, and you do that with small, well-thought out decisions. It's like when you eat food prepared by an excellent chef. You don't know what little tricks they're up to. You're not thinking, "Ah, this butter has had the solids removed so it is actually closer to ghee." You're just thinking, "Man, this is delicious."
We want people to hear the results of our work, not retrace our exact steps. We're not making records for other engineers to like.
Put two different reverbs on two channels and pan them so that one reverb is on the left, the other on the right. Then, feed the signal that you want reverb on to channels, or more one than the other - whatever you want. The more different the two reverbs are, the weirder this effect gets. A short decay time on the left and a long decay time on the right will move the reverb across the speakers from left to right. There are all sorts of things you can do with this set-up.
Set really long pre-delay times. Pre-delay corresponds to how close the nearest wall is in a space. In a small space, the nearest wall is only a few feet away, but in an aircraft hangar, the nearest wall might be hundreds of feet away, so there will be a long pause between the direct sound and the start of the reverberant sound. Our ear makes decisions about the kind of space it is in based on when it hears the initial return of the room, ie., the pre-delay. So, a small room with a huge pre-delay sounds very unnatural, as does a huge room with a very short pre-delay. This is a fun thing to experiment with; it adds a bit of "acoustic confusion" into the mix. Perhaps tie the use of it into the lyrical or emotional content of the song. Like, the singer is expressing doubt or confusion in a section, and to heighten that, add a short reverb with a long pre-delay, which not only pops the lyrics out but also gives the listener a hint of confusion.
Compress your reverb returns. Stick a compressor on the insert of the return channel and squash that stuff. Play with the attack and release. Can you get the reverb to "breathe" along with the tempo of the track? Long attacks will increase the "punch" of the reverb. Short attacks and releases can lend an almost backwards sound to the reverb. Experiment with putting the compressor both before and after the reverb in the insert — you'll get wildly different results.
Duck your reverb returns. Put a compressor on the return (you pick the spot in the insert chain) and then key that compressor to duck the reverb. If you key the compressor off, say, the vocal you're putting reverb on, you'll get a very clear vocal with reverb blossoming whenever the singing stops, and there's no automation needed. What about ducking the backing vocal reverb with the lead vocal, especially if there is an alternating quality to the two parts? You can also key reverbs off percussion so that the kick or the snare stops the reverb for a moment, which can give you all sorts of rhythmic effects in addition to giving your mix clarity. Remember, reverb tends to muddy things up, so if you're ducking during busier sections of the song, you're going to increase clarity in those sections, and differ the effect of the reverb 'til a moment after, so the track will be clean but still have an overall wet quality.
Gate and Key your reverb returns. Gated reverb is a staple effect on drums from the late 70s, to the point where it is a cliché, but gating a reverb and then keying it from another sound source is still a fun thing with which to experiment. Key percussion with itself to get a classic gated reverb effect on something other than a snare. Gate the reverb of a tambourine with the snare so there's a huge wet noise on the snare that isn't the snare. Gently expand (a gate that only reduces output by a few dB, such that when the gate opens there's only a slight volume increase) the tails and decays of pads with the rhythm instruments to extend the feel of the groove into other aspects of the sonic landscape.
Modulate your reverbs. It's amazing how cool a little chorus or phase sounds on reverb, and how people seldom think to do something so simple and effective. In the old days when hardware units were the only option, it was hard to sacrifice something like a rackmount flanger to a reverb, but nowadays, just throw a plug-in on it. Just experiment. Like a lot of effects, modulated reverb is best used sparingly, to heighten a specific moment of a song, rather than having it on all the time. But rules and suggestions are made for breaking and ignoring, so feel free to slop modulation all over the place, but perhaps control it with ducking? Modulated reverb on strings, keyboard pads and chorussy vocals can add an otherworldly effect to things, and you can reign it in using keying and automation.
Goof Around in Fadeouts. Good fadeouts are an art form. I love fadeouts that have a little something in them to catch your ear and pull your attention back into the song. An amazing, fast guitar run, a spectacular vocal moment, someone talking, etc. Doing wacky things with the reverb in a fadeout is always fun. Crank the reverbs up so that things sound like they're going farther away as they fade, or dry things up totally so that the fade makes things sound like they're getting smaller. Roll off the bass gradually and pan things tighter to accentuate the smallness.
A last bit of advice: you’ve got more power in your laptop than anyone in the studio biz has ever had. By next year, that will probably double. Put that power to use in the search for something new, different and yours. Experiment and play. Don’t let Ai have all the fun.
Happy Tuesday!
As promised/threatened, here is another email with usage ideas, inside information, and whatnot on our plug-ins.
El Juan Limiter
The El Juan is the first of our plug-ins using our proprietary licensing system. From now on, all our plug-ins will be using it and we’ll upgrade the original 5 too. Soon.
The El Juan started as a joke. A certain plug-in company changed their business model, switching over to subscription, which pissed a lot of people off. Dan was on Social Media, listening to the complaints, and posted something along the lines of “I’ll make a version of XXX and give it out for free if 1000 people like this post."
A few days later, Dan got to building the El Juan. The origin of the name you should be able to figure out.
The El Juan definitely excels at making things louder, and it does this by limiting and makeup gain. But it also has waveshaping.
Waveshaping
When you change the shape of a waveform, it adds additional complexity, in the form of additional harmonics. A simple sine wave goes in, waveshaping can add an octave to it, or thirds, or whatever you want, really. Waveshaping can add a bunch of sweetness or a bunch of garbage.
The “traditional” analog way to waveshape was to clip the waveform by overloading a component in a circuit or an entire device. Yes, saturation and distortion are forms of waveshaping. Digitally, one can apply math to replicate analog saturation and distortion, and that is waveshaping. Or, unlike the analog world, one can use math to add a very specific, controlled series of harmonics to a waveform.
A simple way to think of this: when I refer to waveshaping, I’m referring to math that adds a limited, very controlled set of harmonics. Saturation uses math to add more than one or two harmonics, and distortion adds tons more harmonics. Waveshaping - simple and a little. Saturation/Distortion - complex and a lot. The El Juan’s waveshaper adds some harmonics, which result in a richer, fuller sound. It doesn’t add saturation per se, it’s waveshaping, it’s adding some of the elements of saturation - the nice ones!
The El Juan has two different waveshaping options, which change the harmonic structure of the signal feeding through it, much the same as feeding the signal through a different console brand will affect the structure of the signal. And this gives you a hint as to how we use the El Juan. Like the PSC and the AIP, we almost always start the El Juan by flipping it around to the back and playing with waveshaping and input eq.
Here’s a video which shows a lot of the power of the El Juan.
The available settings are clearly marked and the effect will be obvious to your ear. Start back here, getting something that you like that fits your mix. Then, switch around to the front and use the limiter section to further process your sound.
Goofy Goofy Secret: the original marketing for El Juan was supposed to be like a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western comic book. The Tale of El Juan was narrated by a robotic turtle named “Old Pedro.” However, when I was typing things out, I made a typo and wrote "Old Pedo.” I thought it was hilarious, so there was a running gag of Old Pedro and various other characters mispronouncing his name and Old Pedo, I mean Old Pedro, having to constantly correct it.
Again, I thought it was funny. But a few people found it less so... and somewhat insensitive, childish, stupid, tone-deaf, etc. So Old Pedro the Turtle got shelved and thus died one of the great marketing ideas in North American history.
Puff Puff mixPass
The Puff makes things apparently louder by using... waveshaping! The Puff Puff is basically a dedicated waveshaper. If something is already compressed and still not sitting there correctly, the Puff will make it a bit louder (and actually undo a bit of the compression by popping out the peaks a little bit).
How does waveshaping make things sound louder? It adds harmonics, and typically, when you add things in audio, there’s a power and loudness, unless things are out of phase. That’s a very simple way of explaining it. Try this: think of additional harmonics as adding density — the signal becomes thicker, richer, and our ears perceive it as louder. Note that the Puff makes things PERCEPTUALLY louder, but there isn’t much of a change on the meters. You don’t get a different LUF reading typically.
Quick Tip: Dan’s basic trick is if something sounds good, do the same thing again. Put a Puff Puff on a channel or a bus, and then add another one, Most of the time the result is a delight.
Both El Juan and Puff are designed as bus processors. That doesn’t mean they won’t work on a single channel, but our development thinking was that these are things you slap on a bus or across a mix. Both do similar things but in very different ways, and there’s also some redundancy. The El Juan also has waveshaping and the Puff also has a clipper on it.
Here’s a thing: You’ve slapped the El Juan across your mix bus, you’re doing some mighty fine limiting and things are sounding good, and you think, “Let’s add the Puff Puff to this and see if we can’t end the loudness wars once and for all.”
Where do you put the Puff? Before the El Juan or after? That’s a good question.
I’ve tried both, and I usually wind up with it after. So, once I limit things with El Juan, then I put the Puff on after it and play around with it a little more. I almost always swap the positions of the two, but generally, the Puff goes after.
Here’s a video where I’m using Puff and El Juan together. Some good ideas here.
Quick Safety Tip: Even though the Puff doesn’t typically change the meters, it doesn’t mean that putting it on last won’t clip your mix bus. One thing I do is have a True Peak meter on the bus after the Puff, and I make sure I’m keeping the true peak value at -1 or even -2, depending. We could have a whole ridiculous discussion of all this stuff and I assure you, we will, and soon.
The WOW Thing
The original WOW thing was a cheap plastic box you could slap on your computer speakers to get things a little wider sounding for, I don’t know, more drama when playing Legend of Zelda. Eventually, the WOW thing found its way onto the guitar tracks of a number of famous albums in the 90s and suddenly it’s a must have guitar secret. And to be honest, it’s great for that. But at its heart, it’s a psychoacoustic processor that uses delay and phase shift to fool your ears into thinking things are outside of the geometry of your speakers.
The WOW gently gets rid of everything below about 1kHz - the more you turn up WOW, the more this frequency cut happens. Hence, the WOW thing by default makes things brighter. And this is where the misnamed TrueBass control comes in, it adds back bass. Actually, it invents bass. It’s not TrueBass at all. All the real bass on the track died in a horrible filtering accident earlier in the signal flow. And this is what I love about the WOW Thing: it’s a great bass/low end enhancer.
I use the True Bass on kicks, bass — anything where I want something kind of big, low and pillowy, rather than something super tight down there. It works great for this. Also, you can’t go wrong putting the WOW thing on reverb returns.
Here’s a video I did a few months back in which I stem mixed a song using only The WOW Thing. There’s a ton of ideas in this video on how to use it to get more bass, more motion, overload it for additional harmonics...!
Pumpkin Spice Latte
This is a surprisingly complex little plug-in disguised as a seasonal beverage.
Pumpkin Spice was designed to be an all-in-one, a mini-channel strip that could get something rough and chewy out of a vocal track. Of course, people are using it all over the place, not just on vocals. I like it especially, a friend of mine swears by it on brass, and it does work.
There are limiters and compressors all over the place on the Pumpkin Spice, and they’re all interactive with the rest of the controls so that you don’t really know they’re there. You can slap this sucker on a raw vocal track and you’d be surprised by how much things will get under control without touching a knob.
Pumpkin Spice is a quick idea tool. Throw it on a track, play around and get some ideas. Perhaps execute the ideas using more adjustable plug-ins, like swapping out the reverb for something with more adjustments, but often it sounds so good as it is, we just leave it on the track.
Fun Usage: Set the delay time to under 5ms or so. Crank up the feedback and you’ll get crazy comb filtering, a “stuck flanger” effect. Change the delay time to shift the resonance up and down. Then, automate that delay time every now and then to wake everyone up. Fun stuff!
That’s it for this Tuesday. See you next week... on Monday.
Warm regards,
Luke
Reverb has been a studio staple effect since the 1950s, and traditionally, it’s been an expensive proposition. As an acoustic phenomena, reverb is complex and re-creating it required dedicated spaces initially—reverb chambers. Real estate ain’t cheap. Later, mechanical reverb simulators, like plate and spring reverbs were developed, but it was still costly. Digital reverbs started appearing in studios in the 80s, sounding great but again, rather expensive.
In the early 90s, the price barrier was broken and digital reverb units became affordable enough to find homes in smaller studios, home set-ups, and in musicians’ live setups. Soon artists were replicating their live and home studio sounds in the big studio by using these little cheap reverb units.
More expensive digital reverb units used a process called convolution to simulate reverb and other delay effects. Convolution required a lot of processing power, which made for an expensive and large unit.
An innovative designer named Keith Barr, trying to skirt this issue, developed a different means of generating reverb in part inspired by an older analog delay technology called “bucket brigade.”
Picture a bucket of water being handed from one person to another to another to another. That handoff takes a moment of time. The more people on the bucket bridge, the longer it takes the bucket to travel from start to finish.
This is roughly how a bucket brigade circuit works: a signal is passed from location to location within a circuit, or within a chipset. In the case of an analog bucket brigade, the signal quality degrades as it goes from location to location — think of water splashing out of the bucket as it’s passed.
Mr Barr did a similar thing but in the digital realm, using a computational loop. Think of the bucket perhaps being passed in a circle. The result wasn’t necessarily realistic, but it had a unique character, and for certain types of effects it was better sounding than convolution. Most importantly, it could be accomplished using less computational power, which resulted in low-cost, physically smaller devices. Instead of needing a dedicated room or a three-rack space box, you could get high-quality reverb out of a guitar pedal.
Mr Barr’s designs found their way into all sorts of processors and into the hands of musicians and engineers. The sound of many genres, such as Shoegaze and Trance, is built around these little, low-cost reverbs.
Our Micro Digital Reverberator is faithful to the sound of these units if not to the technology. Computational power is now cheap. Our MDR is built from carefully sampled impulse responses taken from our own collection of vintage hardware that we used in our home studios decades ago. It’s an interesting twist of fate that an inexpensive process, created to mimic an expensive process, is now itself being mimicked by the expensive process, which isn’t expensive anymore!
Whatever. The MDR has the sonic character of the original units and the fast, easy interfaces that made working with these things such a snap in the studio.
We use them the way we used them 30 years ago: slapping them onto a send and return, picking out a preset, and moving forward on the session with minimal fuss. Sometimes we’ll swap in something different in the final mix but more often than not, the unprepossessing Micro Digital Reverberator winds up being the reverb we use across the entire project. Fast, simple, and inexpensive has always been a winning formula.
Keith Barr died in 2010 at a relatively young 61. He was an innovator and a pioneer.
Happy Monday
First of all, thank you to everyone who submitted a survey. We’ve only managed to read a few so far but the suggestions have been really helpful. If you’re sitting on your survey, remember you have til the end of the month! We do want to hear from you!
Do you steal ideas when working on your music? I do. I’m working on some acoustic guitar stuff that has a swampy kind of sound, so I went poking around in the past and of course turned up this nugget.
Black Water
Tons to hear—what a mood and vibe assembled in such a deceptively simple manner. Lots of little changes to the mix in every new section of the song. Listen and follow along.
0:00 Chimes at the top for a water feel, and then listen for an autoharp strummed (it sounds like someone strumming guitar strings above the nut) just in the back, alternating left and right.
0:07 Two slightly different acoustic guitar parts panned hard left and right. This really tricky, syncopated playing. Kudos for songwriter/lead singer Pat Simmons for overdubbing the second part (I think it’s the one to the right) so tightly. Also a viola comes in, a right center, played to sound like a bluegrass fiddle.
0:18 Lead vocals centered and pretty dry.
0:41 Harmony vocals—sounds like three guys around one mic, panned back and right center.
1:00 More reverb added to the lead vocal for this section.
1:10 Lead vocal pans left and... it sounds like they added a delay and panned that hard right. Could it be a 30ms Cooper Time Cube delay? It’s got a strange frequency response. Or it could be a really really tight double. What do you think?
All those moves in on the vocals in less than a minute, and that’s not counting whoever is riding the gain.
1:31 Drums panned 3/4 left, sounds mono. Very flat, dry sounds—typical dead 70s drums. That kick.... that sounds like an AKG D12. They sort of sound like a “boing” rather than a slap.
Bass comes in, played very tight on top of the acoustic guitar’s low note and weaving around the guitar part. Maybe slightly to the left of center?
1:55 Viola again, but now two tracks and one doing a harmony. They “breathe" and it sounds a bit like an accordion.
2:15 The viola swells in, doing what sounds like a horn part, but I think it’s the viola still.
2:24 A great little tom fill. I love drum parts like this that come out of nowhere and seem almost to be a mistake. Charlie Watts is the master of this.
2:35 A solo acoustic guitar, played with a pick, comes in opposite the viola and the two trade off.
2:57 This is such a cool moment. The bass takes the attention, the lead guitar drops back a bit. There’s a cymbal splash off to the left... I think it might be someone making a “pish” noise with their mouth.
3:08 This is a glorious moment in recorded music history: the acapella break on Black Water. Three tracks, one part right, then one center, then one left. They’re all running through Amigo’s reverb chamber, but I think the right side part, with the bass voice on it, has a complementary really long reverb on it panned left. SO... maybe they printed the reverb to tape and then panned it and then fed it back into the reverb again? The center part is doubled lead singer, the left and right parts are the same guys but singing in different registers and balanced differently around the mics.
3:25 The music fades back in, there’s yet another improvised lead vocal. This might be Tom Johnson instead of Pat Simmons but I can’t tell for sure.
And the song rambles out, back down the river.
Brilliant production by Ted Templeman, wonderful engineering by Don Landee. These are the same guys that did a bunch of Van Halen records.
Black Water was tracked and mixed on an API console, cut to a 3M 24 track 2”, and all this fun happened at the now defunct Warner Brothers Studio in North Hollywood. Note that this studio is often credited as Amigo Studios on records - same place, different name after a buyout.
Black Water became an unlikely single in 1974, the Doobie Brothers’ first #1, and was an instant classic. I remember hearing it as a kid and being amazed at the mood and vibe... 1974... 5th grade??? A bunch of us trying to do the acapella part and totally sucking at it because we were all still sopranos. Sounded like The Brady Six.
Speaking of the brilliant acapella part, and speaking of stealing ideas, Ted Templeman nicked it from here.
I listen to this and I’m amazed by the clarity and depth, and how they pulled this all off with comparatively simple equipment. We’re basically talking API console EQs, a few 1176’s and a reverb chamber.
But what is really going on here is excellent microphones put in exactly the right spot on excellent instruments played by excellent musicians. And the whole event happens in a room specifically designed for recording. And the guy picking and putting the mic in the exact right spot has a closet full of different mics to pick from and years of experience putting different mics on different instruments, and figuring out through the osmosis of experience what works with what.
Daunting. Let's cheat.
The Frequency Chart
Frequency coincides with pitch. Every note played or sung has a specific frequency to it.
A useful idea. So useful that in my early engineering days I had to search around audio textbooks (it was a pre-internet world) to turn up a chart like this:
This was a super handy thing to have. It’s not needed as much anymore because there are EQs with built-in Real Time Analyzers, but I find knowing the numbers and the math very useful.
Here’s a bunch of EQ ideas based around the chart and the math. I’ll be adding to it, and if anyone has an idea to add, send it to me and it’ll go on the chart.
For those of you who wanted something more technical, there ya go.
The Vault of Marco
My buddy Marco sends me things he’s listening to, and Marco tends to listen to obscure stuff that is always sorta cool. The first entry into the Vault of Marco, made all the more timely by the impending elections in the US, is...
You’re the Man - Marvin Gaye
Recorded in 1972, You’re the Man expresses Gaye’s disappointment with leadership in the US and his hopes for better policies for the people. This nice message must be tempered by the fact that Gaye was in huge trouble with the IRS for not paying back taxes and he eventually fled the country.
Motown Records thought the song was too controversial (meaning that there might be financial backlash and boycotts against the label) and didn’t promote it, so it vanished off the charts and out of the cultural consciousness quickly. The album "You’re the Man" was supposed to be released to follow up Gaye’s groundbreaking “What’s Going On” album back in 1972. That didn’t happen either. The album was finally released in 2019, on Marvin Gaye’s 80th birthday, after he had been dead for 36 years.
That’s all for now. Remember to get those surveys in. And of course, feel free to write anytime. It is always a pleasure to chat with you all.
Luke
Korneff Audio
Happy Monday, all
SO... you’ve heard this song a million times, but it’s amazing, so put on your good earbuds or headphones, or listen on your good speakers, or if you’re at your computer and listening on something like iLouds (Dan and I both love our iLouds), put a pillow over your monitor - it tends to clean up imaging - and give this a good listen.
The biggest hit from a very polarizing figure in rock.
Can he sing? Meh... I suppose Lou Reed is the patron saint of singers that really can’t sing, but that didn’t stop him.
The studio was Trident, the producer was David Bowie with Mick Ronson, and the engineer was the amazing Ken Scott. He wrote a nice and detailed memory of the recording session that you can read here. I’ll hit upon a few of the main useful things below.
Herbie Rides Again
The incredibly recognizable opening riff on the bass is courtesy of our hero from last week, Herbie Flowers. It’s amazing how two notes with a slur between them can be so catchy. He was called in to lay down an upright bass part, but ever the businessman, and knowing that he’d get paid more for additional tracking, Herbie suggested an overdub: an electric bass part a 10th up. You hear this part on the chorus and on the vamp out.
Do D’do D’do Do d'Do
'The “colored girls” sing the Do d’do' on the chorus were sung by Thunderthighs, and they weren’t 'colored', they were three white English girls who were session singers in London. And they even had their own hit, Central Park Arrest. It’s.. well, have a listen. A lot of fun and way way out there for a pop tune. And that’s the Thunderthighs in the video! I might have to clean this up audio-wise.
It was written by Lynsey De Paul, who was a major solo artist and singer/songwriter in England in the 70s. Touted as “England’s Carol King,” she wrote for herself and others. Here she seems to have written a song for Saturday Night Fever two years before the BeeGees. I found a playlist of all her singles, if you’re looking for things to inspire. There’s a good chance Herbie Flowers is playing bass on a bunch of these.
Back to 'Walk on the Wild Side', there’s a wonderful, easy effect you can steal. When the Do d’do’s first come in, they sound far away, and as the part continues, the Thinderthighs seem to get closer. Do this: use a pre-fader aux send from a vocal channel, feed it to a reverb unit and crank the reverb’s output up. When the channel fader on the vocals is down, the reverb is dominant, and the vocals sound far away and back there. As you push up the vocal’s fader, they’ll seem to get closer. Of course, use this dramatically.
More Lou Reed
Lou is an acquired taste with a very inconsistent output. He phoned it in at many points in his career, but when he got himself together, and often with a great producer, he made some outstanding music.
Berlin - this was his third solo album and it’s the most depressing record ever recorded. It’s also phenomenally good. I discovered it in college, played it every day for months until one afternoon I noticed my roommate, Carl, crying from it. He loved the album but it made him want to kill himself. Produced by Bob Ezrin, 'Berlin' has a rock band kicking ass alongside an orchestra! Check out Caroline Says I. Doesn’t it sound depressing to you? The Kids features children screaming for their mom and an out-of-tune flute at the end.
Rock n Roll Animal - this is one of the great live albums, not so much for Lou Reed, who seems strung out on most of the tracks, but for the band. Good lord, the band is ABSOLUTELY KILLER. This record will make you want to buy a phase pedal. Also the audience applause was from a John Denver concert. Lou Reed would throw up in his grave if he knew that.
Coney Island Baby - a sleeper of an album, produced by Godfrey Diamond. One doesn’t think of Lou Reed as romantic, but this collection of songs written for his girlfriend of the time, Rachel (who was actually transexual), is lovely and quiet. The two were so close they shared clothes, and that love comes across on the title track, and this wonderful love song She’s My Best Friend.
The Blue Mask - this came out in 1981. It’s Lou Reed live in the studio with guitarist Robert Quine, fretless bassist Fernando Saunders, and a great drummer, Doane Perry. One or two takes per song, then a vocal overdub, and next song please. Great album, great recording, great playing. Title track is killer, but the rest of the album unfolds beautifully. Stunning fretless bass all over, and moods ranging from love to murderous drug withdrawal.
This has been a strange rabbit hole to go down... one visit left from this particular slice of space-time before we’re off to something else.
Thank you for the TON of responses to last week’s New Monday. You all are lovely. Have a great week.
The Guys from Korneff
Happy Monday!
I wish I could go back to ten-year-old me listening to the radio when I heard this for the first time. The damn DJ didn’t say the singer’s name, and I misheard the title as “Rocco,” or “Rock Oh."
Of course, the title is "Rock On,” David Essex’s biggest hit, and 51 years later, it's still amazing.
Essex was more successful as an actor than a musician, but he had 19 top 40 singles in England during his career, as well as successful albums. Rock On cracked the Billboard Top 40.
Slapback on the Vox
Rock On started with a demo, which consisted of Essex singing and playing drums on a garbage can as a drum. The engineer on the session put a loud slapback echo on the demo, and that is really the crux of the sound of it, and what makes it so frickin’ distinctive.
But the lead vocal isn’t echoed the entire time. It sometimes splits and hockets from the left channel to the right, sometimes it’s doubled, sometimes there’s a harmony. There’s a wonderful moment where a mass of vocals drop in like Māori warriors performing a Haka. Supercreative use of vocal texture, and keeping the ear’s interest while never losing the thread of the song.
Chordless Arrangement
The vocals have so much breathing room because of the minimalist arrangement of producer Jeff Wayne. Wayne heard the demo and figured out a score for drums and percussion, bass, and a few string players. The music bed is melody lines rather than chords. In fact, the only true chord is the massed vocal.
The classically trained London string players hired for the session were playing too tight and in tune for Wayne and Essex’s taste. They solved the problem by getting them all a little drunk.
Enter Herbie Flowers
Wayne’s arrangement had a rudimentary bass part. Fortunately for the session, the guy they hired was Herbie Flowers.
Herbie Flowers was a top session man in England. He occasionally toured, but touring got in the way of his very busy studio career. By the end of the '70s he stopped counting the number of records he’d tracked on (over 500 at the time). Flowers played double bass (traditional upright string bass), electric bass and tuba, and was equally proficient playing rock, jazz, classical - whatever the session called for. He played bass for Bowie, Elton John, Miles Davis, all the Beatles except John, and tuba on Abbey Road.
Steal These Ideas
Flowers was also a businessman. At the time, session players got more money the more tracks they laid down. Herbie talked Wayne and Essex into letting him put two tracks down, one low and the other high. The result is the incredibly cool bass part on Rock On. It’s the lick that makes the record.
Flowers tuned the low bass down a half step, which resulted in a low-end mess of rumble at the end of each iteration of the riff.
Usually, putting reverb on a bass isn’t a good idea. But with the right arrangement, it can certainly work, and it does on Rock On. The riff Flowers came up with for the overdubbed high bass part, slathered with plate reverb and a hint of delay, sounds like a guitar part. There’s not a guitar to be found on Rock On.
Check This Out
I found this brilliant guy, Chris Eger, who put together what sounds like a note-for-note version of Rock On, with him playing and singing every part. It's a vision of what happened back in 1973 at Advision Studios in London. It’s a deceptively simple song.
Check out his channel. It’s so damn cool!
The Whole Album is Killer
While Rock On is the standout track, the entire Rock On album, which was Essex’s debut, is a sonic adventure. It’s 70s glam, but it’s peppered with horn arrangements that evoke Vaudeville, strange strange vocals, clever arrangements and wonderful production touches. And tons of Herbie Flowers bass lines with a fat sound that manages to be low and articulate at the same time.
There’s a semi-reggae tune called Ocean Girl... I don’t even know where to begin with this track. Is that an early use of vocoder on that vocal on the left channel? And if not, how did they do that effect? There’s something that sounds like a slide guitar flitting around the background, but I think it’s an Ondes Martenot, which is an obscure French electronic instrument, developed in the late 1920s. It sits somewhere between a cello and a theremin. It’s credited on the album. I think it’s lurking on Ocean Girl. What do you think?
Actually, this whole album is really worth a listen. Seriously. Put it on and cop a bunch of great ideas off of it.
Until next week... Rock On!
That was cheesy.
The Guys at Korneff Audio
As a challenge, I’ve been remixing songs using just one of our plug-ins. This week I remixed with the WOW.
The video is a bit long, because I explain a lot and have too much fun, but the video is chapter marked and I wrote some quick takeaways below.
Key Takeaways
- The WOW Thing adds a lot of brightness and clarity. Plan accordingly.
- The more you crank up WOW, the more stereo-recorded tracks or submixed things will gain ambiance and reverb. More WOW = More Wet.
- Plan your bottom end a bit. TrueBass has a bunch of different low and low mid frequencies to pick from, so spread things out down there. Don’t add TrueBass to the drums and the bass and guitars and keyboards all at the same frequency. Layer things down there. Like lasagna.
- Don’t ignore the potential for saturation. Overload the WOW Thing (or really any of our plug-ins) and you’ll get saturation. Saturation will add subtle compression and some high harmonics to help a track to stand out without using a compressor or an EQ.
Happy Monday
Uh oh! We’ve wound up in Britpop, the early 90s music movement that brought the world bands like Oasis, Pulp, Suede, the Verve and Blur, amongst others.
Britpop is very English, with songs about English themes sung with English accents and harkening back to the English Music Hall tradition, which was the Empire’s version of Vaudeville. Obviously Britpop builds on music by The Beatles, Queen, 10CC and David Bowie, but also stuff from the 80s like The Smiths, XTC, the Cure, et al. Blur in particular channels Mott the Hoople. Singer Daman Albarn does a killer Ian Hunter impression.
Aside from Oasis, none of these bands did much in the US, which is a pity because there is some first-class songwriting, and, like a lot of music out of England, fantastic production.
Especially Blur. If you’re into extravagant production, listening to Blur for a few days will definitely give you a bunch of ideas.
Here are some mixing takeaways from several days of squinting at the Parklife album from 1993. By the way, these are just good mixing ideas in general.
The more sources you have, the more they should be MONO
And this makes sense if you think about it: stereo mic’ing adds width and phase shift and ambiance, all of which will turn into sonic clutter as more and more of it gets added in. So, think one mic, one source, or 1 input one keyboard/amp simulator. On most of the mixes on Parklife the drums are mono down the center.
Think CONTRAST rather than Reverb
You’ll get more depth and drama out of a mix when most of it is dry and only a few things have reverb on them. Again, the more stuff you throw into a mix, the more things get masked, and reverb and echo really mask things up. Listen to good mixes and you might hear a very wet drum sound in there, but chances are it only sounds wet when it’s highlighted by the arrangement. When it’s part of the mix, dry it up. When it’s by itself, wet it up.
Think CONTRAST Left and Right
Use the left and right and down just leave stuff in the middle. Especially on songs that are headphone ear candy. Parklife has things panning everywhere, in some cases languidly migrating from one channel to another. It’s fun! It’s interesting! It’s easy to automate!
Often on Parklife, a percussive part might be on the left, and something smoother and more sustained on the right. Or a percussive part is layered over a sustained part of the same channel so the two parts contrast rather than combine. In general these guys not only thought about what they were playing, but how it was going to fit into the big picture sonically.
CONTRAST by Sections
Contrast by sections. The verse has a distinct sound from the chorus. Perhaps the verse sounds spacious and the chorus sounds claustrophobic. There are clicky guitar parts on the verse and legato parts on the chorus. Change things up, in other words.
THIN Things Out!
Good lord, if there is one thing to remember it is this!
Everything is thinned. There’s an octave between 200Hz and 400hz, and there’s an octave between 2000hz and 4000hz. But one octave has only 200 little frequency guys between the two while the other has 2000 little frequency guys in there. But what is up above 2kHz? Cymbals? Violin overtones? Annoying keyboard patches?
Contrast that to what’s down between, oh, 150hz to 900hz. Like, EVERYTHING lives down there. Just about every instrument or vocal range has most of its fundamentals in that range. It's like the kitchen at a party: everyone wants to be in the kitchen. So, to get ridiculous clarity, either you arrange things — not everyone gets to be down in that area at the same time — or you have to thin things way way out. So, the bass gets its little own space, the guitars get their own little space, etc. Think of an elevator. There’s a weight limit. You can have a lot of people in it, but they have to be skinny.
Thin out the vocals. If you back a singer a few feet off the mic in a pretty dead room you get a thinner vocal that blends well in a mix and doesn’t have a huge amount of muddy warmth. Yes, you can shelve out the bottom end, but it is better to just not record what you don’t want. In general, to me it sounds like Blur isn’t constantly close mic’d. There’s true acoustic space involved.
Focus Focus Focus!
Parklife (and really, almost any good record) is mixed like someone directing a movie. During a movie, the director points the camera and tells the audience “You’re looking at this now.” A good mix works the same way: you’re listening to the vocals now, and now you’re hearing a drum break, and now it’s a guitar solo, etc. In other words, the listener is guided. The arrangement does this, and the mixing does this. PICK what is important. Make it louder. Change what is important on occasion. Let importance shift from part to part.
A Question and an Answer
We got an interesting question last week. Loyal reader Keith asks: “What plugins does Dan use? Is only Korneff or does he use others? The answer: Dan uses mainly Korneff stuff. In fact, often we develop a new plug-in because Dan has been using something from some other company and wants to improve on it. So, Keith, Dan uses the plug-in he designs all the damn time. And Luke almost exclusively so because he doesn’t feel like wasting time auditioning things. He just wants to rock and roll.
A Question for YOU
New Monday keeps evolving. We need some feedback from you all on how to make it better and more useful to you. We want you to be excited and inspired at 10am on Monday when you check your email. What do you like? What do you want more of? What do you want less of?
Dan and Luke
Happy Monday. One thing leads to another.
Happy Accidents
Honestly, this is the whole point: Letting shit happen and then recognizing that it's good shit (or flushing it if it's bad).
A happy accident is when something unintended turns out to be better than any idea you had or thing you tried to make.
A great song is a series of happy accidents connected by music theory. A great production is a series of happy accidents connected by moments of waiting for the next happy accident.
A good creative environment is one where happy accidents are encouraged.
Talent is recognizing happy accidents when they happen.
This whole newsletter is a happy accident. Because of google searches for Shaun Ryder last week, all sorts of content about him is popping up on my feed. Happy accident? Perhaps. But what is important is that I spotted it.
So... here Shaun Ryder discusses a GREAT happy accident:
And here’s a link to the song he’s talking about:
Damn, that is a really catchy groove, Just two chords - like an A to a G. Gorillaz do interesting stuff.
Another fun one, this time courtesy of New Order. You wouldn’t think that a group that is sequenced and, well, orderly, would crop up here. But they do... a quick vid:
An Accident?
This popped up on my feed. I'm not a fan of the band, but this will scoop part of your brain out and smear it on the wall.
It's a room mic feed of EVH recording Eruption. From a talkback mic? Drum overheads? Miscellaneous leakage?
Whatever. It's spectacular playing, and in this recording context, it's pretty clear he dropped that solo like a bomb in one take.
On the album, with that goofy panning and awful reverb... the slickness of it makes me think it was "worked on." Punched in. Comp'd. Done with mirrors.
But the link below sounds like one incredible take. Leaps from one happy accident to another.
Think about how the processing changes the perception.
Here’s a longer discussion of how this came to be.
Happy Accidents and AI
Just to tie the past few weeks together: AI can’t recognize a happy accident. It’s capable of screwing up, but it can’t decide if the screw-up is a keeper.
Remember you have a human superpower right now that gives you an advantage over AI. You have an opinion, and you have taste. Cultivate that over skills.
Dan and Luke
We hope you’re finding this monday thing inspirational and a little bit educational. Let us know how we can make it better.
Most recordists use digital reverb these days, but a lot of the programming of a digital reverb is based on either environmental reverb or mechanical reverb simulators.
Environmental Reverb - sound waves bouncing around a hall or a room, or a reverb/echo chamber.
Mechanical Reverb Simulators - using metal and speakers and pickups to “mimic” naturally occurring acoustic reverb.
This article covers Live room, Chamber, Plate and Spring reverb — how they sound, how they work, where you might find them useful in a recording, etc. There are some musical examples to listen to, and we've made a “cheat sheet” for our Micro Digital Reverberator that will help you when you select programs on it.
But first...
Quick Explanation of Reverb
Highly technical and scientific diagram...
A sound travels out from a source, moving at the speed of sound, which is about 1’/ms (one foot per millisecond). It strikes a surface, like a wall or a cliff, bounces off of it and comes back to our ear, still moving at the speed of sound. If the wall was 20’ away, it would take about 20ms for the sound to travel to the wall, and then another 20ms to travel back. The total time of the echo would be 40ms. If the wall absorbed a bunch of the sounds high end, the echo would sound less bright.
Reverb isn’t one sound wave bouncing off one surface. It’s sound waves bouncing off floors, ceilings, walls, tables, chairs, people, etc. Reverb is thousands, even millions of echoes that happen over a period of time. Rather than hearing a distinct, clear echo, we hear a wash of sound that gradually decays over time as the sound waves are absorbed by the surfaces off of which they bounce. The frequency response of the reverb is caused by the absorption of different frequencies by the surfaces of a space. A big wood room with carpets will absorb fairly evenly, with the highs being absorbed the most. A small tiled room will tend to sound bright because more high frequencies are reflected by the tile rather than absorbed.
You can download our Cheat Sheet here. And here’s a quick thing to try: Get a vocal track, put an MDR on it, and cycle through the programs' marked chamber and then listen for the qualities that are common to all the chamber presets. Do the same for plates, and then for springs, then for live spaces. You'll teach yourself to hear the differences, and then hearing reverb types on recordings, and making choices for your own mixes will be a lot easier.
Alright, enough of that. Onward.
Halls and Room - natural reverb
Big concert halls and large rooms work well with sounds that have slow transients, like strings and orchestras. Big rooms can make drums and percussive sorts of parts sound confused and muddy. As room sizes get smaller, they become useful for adding character or thickening. Small rooms can also sound very weird and kinda ugly.
Studio in the early '70s. Note they’re setting up a mic to pick up the whole room.
The earliest type of reverberation on recordings was caused by the space in which the recording was made. If an orchestra was recorded in a concert hall, the sound of the reverb of that hall would get recorded as well. Ditto for recording anything in live studio space, a little vocal booth, a stairwell or a bathroom, etc.
Concert halls tend to be warm sounding, without an emphasis on highs, and have decay times over 2 seconds. As a natural space gets smaller, it tends to get brighter and a bit wonky sounding. Concert halls are designed with certain frequency response and decay characteristics, while stairways and bathrooms aren’t designed with any thought of acoustics.
To my ears, the decay time of most real spaces - halls, live rooms, have a logarithmic decay time. That is, the reverbs' energy drops off drastically and then slowly tapers away. It sounds like this diagram looks:
There is almost always a hint of the room on any recording made with a microphone, and sometimes that hint is quite pleasant, and sometimes it sucks. A little bit of room on an instrument or vocal can add a subtle doubling effect and make the instrument sound bigger (check out this article here). A room with a lot of character — a bathroom, a hallway, can make a part stand out.
Here’s an orchestral recording of some Iron Maiden. Note that the drums are boxed in with plexiglass. Live drums in a highly reverberant concert hall would be rather unintelligible.
Another thing to listen to: this Cowboy Junkies’ track was recorded basically live in a church around a stereo mic.
Reverb Chambers
Chambers are usually bright and have a rhythmic, repetitive quality to the decay. Chamber reverb is a classic sound on vocals, and putting chambers all over a recording will impart a vintage quality.
Abbey Road reverb chamber. Note that it’s pretty gross and ventilation and plumbing runs through it. Where’s that dehumidifier?? Where’s Ringo?
In 1947, Bill Putnam put a speaker and microphones in a large bathroom at Universal Recording Studios. He fed some of the session he was working on (The Harmonicats Peg O My Heart) into the speaker, picked up the echoes and reflections bouncing around the bathroom with the microphones, and fed that back into his mix. Other studios followed and soon many studio complexes were converting storage rooms or adding on spaces to make a reverb chamber.
Reverb chambers sound somewhat like a concert hall, but much less natural because they’re typically much much smaller. In order to get a longer decay time, reverb chambers were treated to be very reflective, which resulted in longer decay times that are unnaturally bright and have a strange decay quality. Chambers sound like they’re decaying in sections. Think of “chunks” of reverb that get quieter over time, sort of like echoes, but reverb. To me, chamber reverbs have a “cannoning” sound to them — the reverb is thumpy.
Reverb/Echo chambers seem to have a cyclical, sort of “stop and start” decay curve. Visualize it this way:
Motown, the Beatles, everything coming out of Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, and just about everything recorded by a major studio through the 1950 into the early '70s, has reverb from a chamber on it.
Chambers sound lush and articulate, and are great for vocals and adding mood. They can sound big like a hall, but have better definition. A hint of a chamber on a part can add a tangible sense of space. A lot of chamber reverb sounds otherworldly and imparts a lot of mood.
Here’s a great example of chamber reverb: The Flamingos' I Only Have Eyes for You. This recording, done in 1959 live in the studio at Bell Sound Studios in NYC, is groundbreaking in so many ways: it’s one of the first times a record was produced to deliberately have a mood and not just be a documentation of a performance.
Reverb chambers, though, have problems. Often studios built them in basements, and that required constantly running dehumidifiers to keep them from filling up with water. And depending on the studio’s location, having a basically big empty room was stupid, from a real estate perspective. What studio in a major city can afford to pay for the square foot cost of a reverb chamber these days? As real estate prices went up, many chambers wound up converted into studios or office spaces.
Luckily, in the late 1950’s, some smaller solutions to the problem of reverb became available.
Plate Reverb
Plate reverb is luscious and rich. It’s very smooth, with a very even, almost linear decay. It’s the sound of vocals from the mid 1970's right up through now, but it is best used sparsely, to highlight elements of your mix. Too much everywhere makes a mess.
The guts of an EMT plate reverb.
Plate reverbs were usually made from a large plate of steel. A driver (basically a speaker) is screwed in somewhere around the center of the plate, and then two pickups (basically microphones) were screwed into the left and right sides of the plate (stereo!) towards the edges. Instead of the sound waves bouncing around a room, they bounce around the plate, and the result sounds like reverb. The decay time is controlled by damping the plate (imagine holding a huge pillow against it).
The first commercial plate reverb was developed by a German company, Elektromesstecknik. They released the EMT-140 in 1957. It was a monster—8 feet long and 600 pounds, and it wasn’t cheap.... but it was smaller than a reverb chamber and MUCH cheaper than building a room.
Plates became increasingly common through the 1960’s and into the '70s, and it wasn’t really until the advent of digital reverb units in the 1980’s that plate reverb began to fall out of favor. If a record was made from 1966 'til 1985, there’s a good chance there’s a real plate reverb on it.
Plate reverb sounds thick, lush, and has a very even decay time. The frequency response is similar to that of a chamber — a little unnaturally bright—but without the repetitive, segmented decay of a chamber.
Try to visualize a plate reverb in a way similar to this diagram: the reverb trails with energy distributed more or less evenly across its decay:
Plates are often used on vocals, especially lead vocals that need to pop out in the mix. When I was coming up through studios in the '80s and '90s it was common to put a plate reverb on the snare, even if the drums were cut in a big live room. The even decay and “thickness" of a plate reverb is very flattering.
Plate reverbs, too, have their problems. They are big and get in the way — even a small plate reverb is as big as a folding table on its side. You couldn’t have a plate reverb in a control room, not only because of its size, but also because it could start to feedback during the recording session! Studios put plates in the basement, or some other isolated room, and there had to be a remote control, yada yada, but it was sort of a pain in the ass anyway. Elektromesstecknik (EMT) developed the EMT-240, which was much smaller, and used a small piece of gold as a plate. About as big as a large PC, the EMT-240 didn’t require isolation to prevent feedback, and had a warmer character to its sound. Plates are mechanical, and mechanical things wear out and break, and once digital reverb units came onto the scene, plates faded. A few companies still make new plate units, but most of what is available today is either three decades old or a plug-in.
This record of Sister Golden Hair by America has a really nice, sparse use of plate reverb on it. Most of the recording is dry, but you can hear a lot of plate on the slide guitar and backing vocals, and just a touch of it on the lead vocals. This is an impeccable production, by George Martin, of a simply terrific song.
Spring Reverb
Spring reverb is bright and artificial sounding. It’s more of an effect than ambience. Top of the line spring reverbs can be quite beautiful sounding; cheaper units sound strange and “boingy.” When you don’t quite know what something needs, put a spring reverb on it.
The guts of a typical spring reverb.
Spring reverbs use a mechanical system similar to that used in a plate reverb, but instead of a big piece of steel, there are springs. A spring unit is smaller than a plate, and much cheaper, although really good studio quality spring reverb systems, like an AKG BX-20, were, and still are, pretty pricey.
Bell Labs originally patented the spring reverb as a way of simulating delays that would occur over telephone lines. The first musical application was in the 1930's, when spring reverbs began appearing in Hammond organs. Spring reverbs can be made cheap and small, and have been built into guitar amps since the 1950's. Spring reverb on a guitar is an utterly recognizable sound to the point of cliché.
Top quality spring reverbs, like the aforementioned AKG BX-20, are found in studios, but they didn’t replace plates, although they do have similar sonic qualities. An expensive, well-designed spring has a similar frequency response to a plate, but a more jumpy, inconsistent decay. Good spring reverbs impart a “halo” to an instrument. On a vocal, a spring doesn’t really sound like reverb, but rather, it sounds like an effect. I tend to think of spring reverb more as an effect than a means of adding ambience.
Amy Winehouse records used a lot of spring reverb sounds, to evoke a vintage, early 1960’s sort of vibe. I picked her recording of Round Midnight to give you a good example of a spring reverb on a voice. Notice the shimmering halo that surrounds the lead vocal— that’s a spring reverb. And listen for the level of the reverb changing during the mix, accentuating certain parts of the song.
Cheap spring reverbs sound boingy, but even that can be a useful effect. Rather than presenting some sort of cliché surf guitar as a reference for this sound, here’s a bit of madness from King Tubby. This is crazy stuff, with spring reverbs on drums and vocals, runaway tape delay all over the place, noises, distortion and slams, weird EQ’ing and filtering. If you’ve not listened to King Tubby.... jeez! Go listen to King Tubby!
We Have Reached the End of the Decay Time
So, some ideas, some patches, some tech stuff. I’ll cover what digital reverbs do in the future (really, what digital reverbs usually do is simulate all the reverbs I've described above). Remember, everything written above (except for the facts of how the various types of reverbs are constructed), is just a guideline. There are no commandments here. Use your ear, listen to recordings, and experiment.
Nailing the reverb and ambience on lead vocals can be really tricky. This week, we’re going to show you a method for doing vocal ‘verb that’s easy, basically fool proof, and will work for music of any genre. AND we’re going to show you a nifty vocal reverb trick that you can use to highlight a specific section of a song.
Three Reverbs on a Vocal
The basis of this method of getting vocal reverb is similar to that which we use on snare - read Dan’s Snare Trick blog post from last week if you missed it. We will be using three different reverbs. The first will add thickness and presence to the vocal, the second will place the vocal in an acoustic space, and the third reverb is a special, which you can use to highlight the vocal in specific sections of the song.
ONE: Thick and Present
First, instantiate a Micro Digital Reverberator on the vocal channel’s insert, after all the other processing you’ve got happening (EQ, compression, etc.). Regardless of what MDR program you use, turn DRY fully clockwise and lower WET to around 50%. You’ll adjust WET more later.
Settings for Thick and Present vocal reverb
For a program, you’re looking for a small room that will add texture and thickness to the vocal but not really reverb.
These are the programs we like to use. We tend to choose one that is the opposite of the voice — it it is a dark, bass voice we choose a brighter program. For a bright or higher voice, try one of the darker settings. If you don’t know what to pick, just use Machine 1 Small 1, it always works great for this.
Machine 1 Small 1
Machine 2 01 Small Bright .1 SEC
Machine 2 02 Small Bright .2 SEC
Machine 2 03 Small Bright .3 SEC
Machine 2 05 Medium Bright .6 SEC
Machine 2 09 Medium Dark .5 SEC
With reverb times above 300 ms (.3 seconds or higher) beware setting WET too high, it can sound like a bathroom. Typically, we wind up using Machine 1 Small 1 or Machine 2 09.
Most vocal tracks are recorded in mono, but at this stage, switch the channel’s output to stereo—you’ll see why in a moment.
Press the Korneff nameplate to pivot around to the back of the MDR, find the WIDTH trimpot and set it to 50% or lower. Because you’ve switched your mono vocal track into stereo, the stereo width control will have the effect of widening the voice a little bit. You can crank it all the way up to 200%, but depending on the song this might be a bit distracting. This is one of the settings you’ll be messing with later in your mix as you add in instruments, etc.
So, now your vocal should be a little bit bigger and commanding more attention in your mix, but it won’t be louder or processed sounding.
Quick trick here: crank up the INPUT gain to drive the MDR a little bit. This will get you a cool, slightly grainy saturation. Be sure you turn the OUTPUT gain down otherwise you’ll digitally clip the channel, and that will sound like ass.
TWO: Reverb and Ambience
The vocal, at this stage, is probably too dry to sound polished and professional, so we want to add a reverb effect that we can really hear and recognize as reverb. We’ll do this using an effects send.
Set-up a send from the vocal channel, and put an MDR on the insert of the Return. Set the DRY to 100% and the WET to 0%—this is the way the MDR initially loads in.
Some vocal reverb choices
There are a TON of possible reverb programs on the MDR to choose from at this point, so a lot of what you pick will come down to taste. We typically use medium and smaller sounding rooms on vocals when songs are fast, and bigger, large rooms and plates and halls when songs are slower. These are the settings that we keep going back to all the time:
Machine 2 13 Large Warm 1.1 SEC is a gorgeous reverb and generally where I start. IF it is too bright, I look for something darker, if it is too big I look for something smaller, etc. This particular program blends really well within a full mix, and it adds polish without making things sound “reverby” like a record from the early ‘60s.
Machine 2 22 Large Warm 1.75 SEC sounds like a vintage echo chamber and is very musical and rhythmic on a vocal. Great for ballads and things like that.
Machine 1 Large 1 always sounds good, but it might be too much for some music.
Machine 1 Small 5 works great on vocals with lots of short words when intelligibility is needed.
Machine 1 Small 6 This isn’t a room, it is a smooth and dark plate reverb effect, and it can be way too much. We like to use this but throw it way back in the mix so you only really hear it in the gaps of the other instruments.
THREE: A Special
During your mix, you’ll probably have some moments where you want the vocal to jump out and really call attention to itself. For that, we’re going to use a special.
Sibilance - your enemy, your little pal...
Generally, on vocals, we try to get control of sibilance. Sibilant frequencies are in the 5kHZ area and they add intelligibility to speech and singing. They are the frequencies generated by consonants. As people get older, these frequencies get harder to hear, which is why you have to repeat yourself and speak very clearly around grandma and grandpa (especially if they were in a punk band when they were younger). Too much sibilance on a record, though, sounds hissy and spitty. It’s caused by sounds like S and T overloading a microphone or a preamp somewhere. Usually, we don’t want sibilance. However, this trick is all about generating sibilance.
Set up yet another effects send from your vocal channel. Crank up the send level a bit. On the return channel, add channel EQ or a High Pass Filter, and follow it with yet another MDR on that insert. Set it to 100% WET, 0% DRY.
Dan loves the Vocal Whisper preset on the Lexicon 480L unit, so we’re going to sort of rip that sound off a bit.
EQ and Reverb settings for the Vocal Whispers effect.
On the channel EQ you’ve got before the MDR, put a high pass filter at about 10kHZ and roll off everything below it. This will prevent almost anything other than high pitched vocal sounds from getting to the MDR.
On the MDR, set it to Machine 2 50 Multitap Reverse. Flip around to the back panel of the MDR and set DAMPING to -1.6dB, LPF to 13.2kHz and WIDTH to 170% (you can go higher).
As you play your mix, you’ll notice that S’s and T’s, and other sibilant consonants, will jump out and kind of sound like ghostly whispers. Adjust the High Pass Filter of the EQ to get more or less of the effect. Dan likes to use this in relatively open areas of the song to create a scary, unsettling mood.
A good way to figure out where you want to use this effect is to put it on the vocal somewhere in the middle of your mix process and listen to the entire mix with it a few times. Generally, there will be certain spots where the effect jumps out. I often just leave stuff like this on always so there is a random element happening in the mix to give me ideas.
Some Other Ideas
There are all sorts of fun variations on this you can try. As an example, rather than setting a high pass filter, set a low pass around 400Hz and send all that dark, warm low-end gunk into the MDR. Set the MDR to Machine 2 34 Slow Gate 450 MSEC. If you listen to the effect all by itself it, it sounds like a moron singing in the shower, but in the mix it gives the vocal subtle movement and texture, and makes it seem wetter than it actually is. When I do this, I set my other vocal reverbs to something bright so things don’t get muddy.
And of course, try this trick on guitars, synths, etc.
And that is it for this week. Let us know how this all works for you on our Discord or Facebook.
Thoughts on Reverb by Dan Korneff
Reverb is probably the most often used effect in modern recordings. When you think about it, the ability to transform the space in which our instruments exist with a couple clicks of a button is pretty mind blowing. As with any element in the recording process, the use (or misuse) of reverb is completely subjective, and your only limitation is your imagination.
In my world, reverb serves two completely different, and equally important purposes. The first use is a very practical approach. Whether you realize it or not, EVERYTHING you hear exists in some kind of space. When you’re having a conversation with someone, their voice sounds different in a hallway than it does in a closet. Even if the closet is really small, you still hear some type of ambiance. You not only hear the direct sound of a source, but you also experience the ambiance of the environment.
Since most modern engineers spend a good amount of time isolating instruments (close mics with tons of baffles) and removing the environment from their tracks (ever use a reflection filter on your vocal mic?), The very first thing I do, especially on vocals, is insert a reverb on the channel and create an ambient “space”. I’m not talking about slapping a 3 second reverb on everything. It’s going to be something short — 1 to 3 seconds. Just a touch of something to make the track sound like it’s not hovering in the center of an anechoic chamber. Since I’m trying to recreate a natural space, it only seems fitting to use a more “natural” sounding reverb. One of my favorite settings is the MDR Machine 2 on Preset 1. It’s small and bright, and a tiny bit just fits right in for me.
Give these shorter reverbs a try on some tracks. You might just be surprised by how quickly your mix starts becoming bigger and better sounding.
The second approach is way less practical, and a LOT more fun! I grew up in the 80’s, where EVERYTHING was bigger. It wasn’t just the size of your AquaNet-soaked hair at school, it was reverb too! Everything was drenched in it. You’d have to send a rescue dog on a daily basis to help find your favorite singer at the bottom of a well. Every snare sounded like a punching bag, exploding from the speakers. What's not fun about that??
The impractical use of unnatural sounding spaces can lead to some really unique sounds that are so odd you’ll want to hear them over and over again. Using a setting like Machine 1 – Large 7 on a sparse guitar performance, or a short percussive vocal hook might just be that over-the-top decay you need to make the track stand out. Exaggerate your snare with the exploding ambiance of Machine 1 – Large 3. Add a little texture to a vocal with Machine 2 – Program 49.
If you’ve been behind the console for 25 years like me, reverb is not a new concept. Using these units for their practical purpose can be a thankless job, but necessary to bring extra realism to your music. But don’t deny yourself the fun of creating wildly unnatural or super exaggerated moments in your tracks whenever you can. Reverb might just become fun again for you.