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History of Reverb and Echo in Audio Production Recording Essay

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History of Reverb and Echo in Audio Production Recording Natural occurring reverb goes further back than man on earth. Since before man, creatures and nature made sounds that created natural reverb and echo. But now in today’s age with men and the modern technology that they have created there are all sorts of ways to create reverb and echo. From big metal sheets to plug-ins in a DAW on a computer, engineers have found ways to incorporate and benefit from reverb and echo on a recorded audio track. But before skipping into today’s ways of recording reverb and echo let’s shed some light on what reverb and echo truly is and where it came from. Reverberation or as most people refer to it as reverb, refers to the way sound waves reflects of …show more content…

A reverb chamber is a hollow arena used to create echoing sounds. Building a room with non-parallel surfaces and then applying shellac to all the surfaces so make them acoustically reflective creates an echo/reverb chamber. A speaker and microphones in the room would pick up the reflection of the speakers output this method was very popular in the 60’s. Soon enough a new technology of reverb came about, Spring reverb. Sam Phillips of Sun Records had used tape echo when recording Elvis in the early days. Spring reverb is a type of electromechanical reverb device. It creates a reverb effect by inducing sound vibrations at one end of a long wire (which is coiled into a spring to decrease the amount of area it takes up, that’s why it is called spring reverb). Another transducer at the extreme end picks up the vibrations. As the waves reflect back and forth from one end of the spring to the other, and back, a reverb effect is produced. Spring reverbs have a harsh, trebly sound (and vulnerable to exterior shock), but they are inexpensive to build and provided a new way for reverb. Eventually the technology became more advanced and a new form of reverb was created; plate reverb changed the reverb game in 1957 when German company EMT (Elektromesstecknik) released the first plate reverb, EMT 140 Reverberation Unit. This plate reverb system used an electromechanical transducer to create vibration in a large plate of

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