Chamber; Plate; Cathedral; Gated - dbx 290 Operation Manual

Reverb Types
the chamber's decay tends to get out of the way more quickly than the
hall's, the chamber is ideal for vocals and/or instrumental parts that tend
to get stacked during recording. Chambers are also very useful for more
percussive, upbeat styles of music .
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Plates are another attempt to artificially emulate natural ambiences that
have instead become accepted for their own unique sound. Plate
reverbs are made with large sheet of metal suspended in a box. Sound
is induced at one end of the metal sheet with transducers that cause the
metal to vibrate. Pickups at the other end of the metal receive the multi­
ple reverberations.
The results are quite unique. The Plate reverb has a slight metallic quali­
ty that makes instruments and voices sound a little brighter and thus
more present. Reverb plates have a very thin , smooth high end while
the low end is more dense. These characteristics work well for percus­
sion instruments.
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The most natural and familiar environment is probably that of the cathe­
dral or church. Often large churches are built for the purpose of hous­
ing visual ornamentation and seating large groups of people for worship.
By the sheer size of these rooms and the amount of people in them (or
sometimes how empty they were), cathedrals and churches all over the
world have become famous for their unique sound qualities.
These large rooms usually have a great deal of early reflection energy
(because of smaller pulpit areas) while the reverb itself is very rich in the
lower frequencies (because of the large room's ability to sustain low fre­
quency energy). The cathedral reverbs make anything sound big,
whether it's an organ with a choir or a thunder clap.
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Linear reverberation, or gated reverbs as they are more commonly ref­
ered to, are the most unnatural ambiences used on a regular
basis.
Originally, large dense reverbs were cut off using a noise gate.
Eventuall y, it was discovered that using very linear reverbs with no
regeneration produce the same type of sound with even more flexibility .
Since the decay is linear, the shape of the reverb can be changed. Using
the flat setting gives you the familiar gated reverb sound. The reverse
setting ramps the energy from its lowest point up, making things sound
almost backwards. The normal ramp down setting can be used as stand­
alone early reflections to emulate very small , intense rooms.
Plate
Cathedral
Gated
Stereo
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Reverb
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