There are four different ways in which reverb is created in the studio. The first to be invented, the echo chamber, isn’t a simulation but rather a room in its own right. The concept is simple: place a speaker in a lively acoustic space, play a signal through it, and collect the resulting reverberations with a microphone. Despite creating actual reverb, echo chambers are impractical – fun if you get the opportunity, but artificial solutions make life easier…
Electro-mechanical reverbs – plates and springs – were the first such solutions to come along, but, whilst characterful, their usefulness is limited by the scanty control one has over the reverb sound. The same cannot be said of digital ‘algorithmic’ reverb, which creates big stacks of delay lines to simulate what happens when sound waves bounce and scatter around a room, and so offers many ways in which to influence the reverb effect.
Convolution reverb imprints onto a signal
