Making Music on a Budget: Reverb

This is the second in a planned series of posts describing ways musicians can create good sounding music without breaking the bank. This post is about reverb, a critical aspect of any project studio.

If you read the first post in this series, on workstations, you'll know that any digital audio workstation should come with certain effects that allow you to process the sounds in your mix, to add depth and fullness, and generally make things sound "sweeter." A key effect you need out of the box is reverb, which is short for reverberation. Simply put, reverb gives you the capability to simulate various acoustic spaces, such as concert halls, factories, or rooms. This comes in handy when you want certain sounds to appear to the listener to come from in front or rear of the perceptual area. Some reverb effects also give you an option to add predelay effects. These create echoes within the reverb that make sounds appear to bounce around and sound more interesting to the ear.

While the reverb effects out of the box with Mixcraft, my workstation software of choice, are useful and helped me get started quickly, I found as time passed that I wanted something with a little better sound. Some digital reverbs have noticeable imperfections, especially in the longer hall and factory settings. So, I started looking around for alternatives on the Internet. The first thing I found was GlaceVerb, a very useful (and free!) reverb from Dasample. GlaceVerb provides lots of acoustic environments out of the box, you can tweak it, and because it's a VST-compatible plugin, my workstation has no problem working with it. You can set predelays, and one of the really cool presets on the unit lets you create doppler-type pitch shifts that you can use to chilling effect, as I did on the piano track in the following cut (which you can license through Pond5):


Over time, I got even more picky, and I eventually went looking to see if I could find an even better sounding reverb. I eventually did, in the form of Ambience. This reverb, which was once only available as donationware, became freeware in 2010. As advertised, Ambience really does rival the best commercial reverbs, in my opinion. The only slight problem I have is that when I go back to reload a project I previously saved, the reverb seems to lose track of what preset I saved it in. Since the product is no longer being maintained to my knowledge, there's not much I can do about it. However, going back and resetting those presets is a small price for the amazing sound quality this tool delivers.