Reverb...

Reverb Effects.

Before the widespread proliferation of television sets in the 1950s, reverb effects were already in use in studios making records. The early reverbs were based on microphone and transducer technology. Reverb was created naturally in good sounding rooms or "chambers" with highly reflective walls and movable baffles. Microphones were placed in the room at various location to pick up the ambient sound. These were large, expensive rooms of about 2000 square feet! Here's a pic of a great reverberant chamber. Few studios could afford to build a room this size, so quite quickly, plate and foil reverbs came about. The Plate reverb was really a large steel plate, held up inside a frame so it could vibrate freely. The plates were anywhere between 6 and 18 feet tall and had to be isolated in a room of its own. Imagine trying to do a home studio in those days! Amplified soundwaves would make the plate radiate, like a large gong does, and microphones would pick up these vibrations and send them back to the control room as an audio signal. So when you look at your digital FX box and see "plate reverb" and "chamber reverb" that's what these effects are tryng to emulate through digital mathematics. Lets move on. . The Spring reverb came about next and was quickly adopted by guitar amps. Inside these units was a metal spring, like a Slinky, that vibrated with the amplified audio. You may have seen guitarists bang on their amps to get the spring to distort, and many radio shows used this effect to simulate thunder and lightning. Here's a pic of how it worked.