Reverb is the wash of reflections a sound makes as it bounces around a space, and it is what tells your ear whether something is in a small room, a big hall or nowhere at all. Add it and a dry, close sound gains a sense of place and distance. The controls decide how large that space seems and how long it takes to fade.
The controls are much the same on almost every reverb, hardware or plugin: pre-delay, decay, size, damping, early reflections and a dry/wet mix, usually with some EQ on the tail. None of this is tied to one product.
Reverb adds the reflections a sound makes as it bounces off the surfaces around it, which is what tells your ear what space the sound is in. When a sound happens in a real room it does not reach you just once. It arrives first straight from the source, then a moment later as a scatter of early reflections off the nearest walls, floor and ceiling, and then as a dense tail of thousands of reflections piling up and slowly fading as the energy is absorbed. Your ear reads all of that at once and knows, without being told, roughly how big the space is and how far away the sound sits.
A reverb effect recreates that behaviour. Feed it a dry, close sound with no space of its own and it generates the early reflections and the fading tail for you, so the sound seems to sit in a room, a hall or a cavern that was never there. This is why almost nothing in a finished mix is completely dry. A voice or an instrument recorded up close can sound flat and pasted on, and a little reverb gives it somewhere to be.
The main thing it buys you is depth and a sense of place. Two sounds sent to the same reverb start to feel as though they were played in the same room, which pulls a mix together. Beyond that it sets a mood, since a short, tight room and a long, vast hall say very different things, and it can push a sound backward so it sits behind the parts you want up front.
Reverb is not a layer of gloss added on top of a sound. It is the space around the sound. Everything it is known for, depth, size, glue and distance, comes from the pattern and timing of the reflections it adds, which you shape with the controls below. Used gently it is almost invisible and simply makes things sound real; pushed hard it becomes an obvious effect in its own right.
The common types are room, hall, plate, spring, chamber and convolution. They differ mainly in the size and character of the space they imitate, and in how they were originally made. The names come from the hardware they grew out of, but on a plugin they are really just presets for a certain kind of space.
| Type | What it is | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Room | A small to medium enclosed space, short and dense with a fast fading tail. | A natural sense of place without much wash. Good on drums and close instruments that should sound real but not distant. |
| Hall | A large space like a concert hall, with a long, smooth, spacious tail and a noticeable bloom. | Grand and cinematic. Suits pads, strings, orchestral parts and ambient beds where you want obvious size. |
| Plate | An electromechanical unit that vibrates a large metal plate. Smooth, dense and bright, with no real early reflections. | A classic on vocals and snares. Adds sheen and length without sounding like a specific room. |
| Spring | A tank of springs, the reverb built into many guitar amps. Boingy, metallic and coloured. | A strong character effect. Common on surf and dub guitar, and anywhere you want the sound of the hardware over realism. |
| Chamber | Originally a real reverberant room fitted with a speaker and microphones. Dense and smooth, sitting between a room and a hall. | A warm, natural size that works on vocals and on a whole mix. |
| Convolution | Uses an impulse response, a recording of a real space or unit, to reproduce it. | The most realistic option, since the space is a captured fingerprint of an actual room, hall or piece of hardware. |
Most reverb plugins fall into two camps. Algorithmic reverbs, which covers most room, hall, plate and spring emulations, build the tail from a network of delays and feedback, so they are light on the computer and easy to shape. Convolution reverbs instead play your sound through a recorded fingerprint of a real space, which can sound extremely realistic but is less free to adjust. In practice you rarely need to worry about the label. Choose by the space you are after, a tight room for realism, a long hall for scale, a plate for sheen, and judge it by ear.
The main controls set how long the tail lasts, how big the space seems, how bright it is and how much of it you hear. The most useful are pre-delay, decay, size, damping, early reflections and the dry/wet mix, usually with EQ to shape the tail. Here is what each one does and a sensible place to start.
| Control | What it does | A place to start |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-delay | The gap between the dry sound and the start of the reverb, in milliseconds. A longer pre-delay keeps the original sound clear before the wash arrives. | 20 to 40 ms to keep a vocal or a transient distinct |
| Decay (RT60) | How long the tail takes to fade to near silence. Short reads as a small space, long reads as a big one. This is the single biggest cue for size. | 0.8 to 1.5 s for most parts, longer for ambient |
| Size | How large the modelled space is, which changes the spacing and density of the reflections. | Match to the space you want, small for intimacy |
| Damping / tone | How quickly the high frequencies fade from the tail. More damping gives a darker, softer space, the way soft surfaces would. | More damping to sit reverb behind the mix |
| Early reflections | The first distinct bounces before the tail, which carry most of the sense of a room's size and shape. | More for a real room feel, fewer for a smooth wash |
| Dry/wet mix | The balance of untreated sound to reverb. On a send this is usually left fully wet. | Start low and add until you notice it, then back off |
| High / low cut | EQ on the tail, rolling off the extreme highs and lows so the reverb does not add mud or hiss. | Roll off below about 200 Hz and above about 8 kHz to taste |
Pre-delay and decay are the two you will reach for most. Pre-delay is the short silence between the dry sound and the first of the reverb, and even 20 or 30 milliseconds of it lets a word or a drum hit land cleanly before the wash sets in, so the reverb adds space without smearing the attack. Decay is simply how long the tail lasts, and it is the strongest cue for how large the space feels, from a fraction of a second in a small room to several seconds in a cathedral.
Damping controls how the tail ages. In a real space, soft surfaces such as curtains and carpet soak up the high frequencies faster than the lows, so a distant sound is duller than a close one. Turning damping up copies that, giving a warmer tail that tucks in behind the mix, while turning it down leaves a brighter, glassier space that sits more forward. The dry/wet mix then sets how much of all this you actually hear, and on a send you usually run it fully wet and control the amount with the send level instead.
Put reverb on a send so several parts share one space, use pre-delay to keep transients clear, and EQ the tail so it does not pile up in the low mids. Reverb is where a lot of mixes turn cloudy, because every part with its own long, full reverb adds a layer of wash that stacks up until nothing is clear. A handful of habits keep the space and lose the mud.
A useful test is to solo the reverb return on its own. If it sounds boomy, harsh or like a recognisable copy of the dry part, it will muddy the mix, so EQ it until the tail is smooth and a little darker than the source. And if the whole mix still sounds cloudy once your reverbs are under control, the cause is usually somewhere else as well: there is a whole guide on why a mix sounds muddy and how to clear it.
Not all reverb is meant to be invisible. In ambient and cinematic work a long, heavily EQ'd reverb becomes a texture in its own right, a wash you write with rather than hide. That is a large part of building a soundscape, where the space is as much the music as the notes are. The rules above still apply, you just choose to keep more of the wash.
Reverb is a mixing move. It gives a sound a space to sit in, but it cannot invent the sound in the first place, and a flat, lifeless part in a beautiful reverb is still a flat, lifeless part. The interesting work is making a source worth placing.
We do not make a reverb plugin, and this guide is not a pitch for one. But reverb is easier when the sound going into it already has a space of its own. The Collection is our three instruments together, ARGISH, SILT and REHEAT, with three separate licence keys. Each one makes source material that already breathes and evolves: ARGISH is a self-playing drone synth, SILT is a tape-loop instrument that wears sounds into texture, and REHEAT writes acid lines. Parts like that carry their own atmosphere, so you place them with a reverb rather than fighting a dry, static sound.
Every one ships as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX for Pro Tools and a standalone app on macOS, signed and notarized, and a VST3 on Windows. You can hear one free in your browser first, no install and no account, then decide.
Everything on this page works by hand with any reverb in any DAW, which is rather the point of writing it down.
We write these when there is something worth writing down. One email when a new one lands or a new Tunary instrument ships. No newsletter, no schedule.
Tunary