Between Eventide and Lexicon, I have any reverb I can imagine with complete control. Plus, all DAW's and soft synths have their own in plenty. Sheesh, I know what my ears tell me. The old spring and plate reverbs still sound fine. Listen to an Everly Brothers song. Back then they mostly used reverb as "glue". Record in the highest fidelity, and then almost everything went into the reverb to make it sound like a band, or group. Most listeners have no idea what reverb is. They just sub-consciencely hear it and don't give a hoot. They just feel it when it's good. Every song has it's own niche for effects. Verb misplaced or filtered wrong can fuck up a mix as quickly as bad compression.

 

Last edited: Jul 14, 2019

Because you use your ear and taste to set something that sounds best for the song. Not just what works in math.

 

@devilorcracker , the predelay is basically an acoustic phenomenon related to how big the room is and the distance to the closest obstacles from where you stand. It has nothing to do with the song's BPM, instead it's almost a tonal control (like a weird EQ) because very small changes in the predelay cause the reverb signal and the dry signal to phase against one another and create different vibes. You really owe it to yourself to go down into that Haas short delay range and tune it finely without any math just as a continuous tone control. If you're not using it this way thinking that you gotta "math it" because math is some vodoo magic that will put your track in the top charts, you might miss out on a lot of cool tones that are just humbly hanging out in there waiting to be found.

As the predelay grows in length and you now can hear your entire reverb as a separate echo, this is where it stops being a tone control and *might* benefit from being tuned to the track BPM - but normally no one uses such huge predelays on their verb, so...

 

Last edited: Jul 14, 2019

Waves reverbs are great,sound nice but are way too hard on the cpu!Especially H-reverb Abbeyroad Plates.
I don't use them anymore because of that.

 

reverb doesn't need math ,the math need reverb so it will sound more wet and likable

 

I really trust your explanations. Keep it up man

 

Oh, amen. To add to your excellent post, it's worth trying just to use the ER section of a given reverb. Shitty algorithmic ones can alse be sometimes especially useful, I'm sure all of use have a lot of "those" reverbs that we never use, but I urge everybody to give them a shot, you never know.

(Logic circa version 4 used to have "AVerb" which was brilliant for this purpose and I've never found anything to replace it after they moved to Mac only...)

 

Or download this chart. No math involved. I keep it under the clear desk protector on my console.
https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/bpm-delay-times-cheat-sheet/

 

seems we switched from reverb predeleay to delay

or are them the same charts/cheat sheets ?? seems so

 

Last edited: Jul 15, 2019

If i want to compress the reverb track...the math is goin weird...Keep in mind if you will use buss compressor then the reverb...huh. I think the math is more accurate for delay effects.

 

as a starting point for reverb settings, I use my ears and tap out the time (even polyrhythmically as I'm lucky enough to be multi-limbed) or I feel the groove.
I save maths for counting my moneyz...
It's easy coz it's very small numbers I have to deal with...

And when me ears don't work or me limbs are sore or no groove got to enter the recording chain... I also use dtc calculator.
ba-dum tish.

https://resonic.at/tools/dtc

edit: sorry, already mentioned by @darthloud
I should have read more closely.

OT:
as an apology, take a peep at this to see why we're all doomed:
https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2017/01/04/japanese-photographer-makes-hats-cats-hair-theyve-shed/

 

Last edited: Jul 14, 2019

You can just use ur ears and save the calculator to plot out pi ad infinitum.

 

Totally correct. Indeed the delay is the effect where maths are important. It's what I wanted to say on my first post but I forgot this thread is about reverb too. Not that you can't use the BPM on some algo reverbs, but is another beast.

 

it became a hybrid thread , math charts for reverb and delay

 

If nobody already said it, what might be of import in regard to reverb and syncing to bpm is pre-delay, and for the ultra fussy anal retentive perfectionist, and damn the cost to life, limb and home, early reflections calculated for the groove.

 

... as well as syncing any modulation if available.

 

Indeed. Reverb, delay and now... high end laxatives?

 

May all your moves be smooth...while making mixing, that is.

 

Thanks for this! Nice looking calculator. It'll be really nice to have this on my production workstation. I've been using Echolalia Delay Calc on android, but couldn't find it anymore on Google Play to link to. But there's a bunch of delay calculator apps in the store, though.

This is pretty much how I use different pre-delays to establish depth when I didn't record any room mics. Once I did this to a mix, it really helped separation between different elements in the mix. I could hear the different instruments more clearly. I calculated pre-delay based on distance.