Reverb in Industrial Music

Reverberation is a key effect in Industrial Music, it has the double purpose of both clean or dirty up the sounds.

Research in Industrial Music is often performed through deep distortion and heavy processing of sounds which sometimes lead to inconsistency, lack of harmonics and general dullness: characteristics that make the sound itself easily masked in the mix by other, more powerful, instruments. Here a good reverb can help the sound be perceived again.

The other employment is quite the reverse process, by reverberating some sound and adding distortion afterwards it's possible to dirty up material otherwise too clean for the Industrial freaks.

Personally I am using both analog and VST reverb units because for an effect of such importance I need a choice as wide as possible.

As outboard I got an oldschool ALT Multiverb LTX:

which has the harsh sound I am looking for. It works with just presets but once found the good ones it's ready to rock. Indeed it's connected right after a Spring Reverb, developing a nice metallic sound.


On the ITB side I've tried thousand different VST but at the moment in my opinion two are the best: the Omniverb 2.0.2

and the reverberation section from the Space Echo VST


They both work great as a pre-distortion processing technique but the Tape Echo works a bit better than Omniverb for post-distortion.

Two Delay units used to make stereo a Spring Reverb

I'm the lucky owner of a vintage Eagle Products Spring Reverb. It must be quite a rare device as Google knows nothing about it. Its sound is very typical but the possible settings are nearly zero.



Another weakness is that it's mono and since reverbs are used to widen the stereo image this makes it unusable to mix a song.

In my rack two Digital Delays that I had for free from friends were collecting dust: a Roland SDE-1000 and a Roland GP-8. Same brand, so they should sound similar...this is perfect for what I had in mind...




Phasers, Flangers, Reverbs, Echoes are always delays with different settings. In fact with about 20ms of delay and a bit of feedback a delay becomes a sort of reverb. With this in mind I ran a splitted cable out of the spring reverb so to feed the same mono signal into the two delay units configured as reverbs but with slightly different delay times. The resulting signals going back to the mixer were pan-potted to about 90%. Here I should have worried a little about phase correlation problems when processing low frequency material but I just didn't mind since I always center anything below 150hz when finalizing for vinyl.

Finally, I shaped the L+R return with a little EQ and the result is a lovely stereo effect!


Ingredients:

• Eagle Products Vintage Analog Spring Reverb


• Roland SDE-1000 Digital Delay


• Roland GP-8 Guitar Effect Processor

Space Echo VST

I always loved Tape Delays, from the time one has been used in the recording of my first record I was fascinated by the concept behind them and by the sound they produced.

I say "produced", because a thirty-years-old magnetic tape is not and effect anymore: it's a sound generator - triggered by an external signal.

Recently I had the chance to try this nice VST plug-in that emulates the mighty Roland RE-201:



I must admit the sound is very convincing for a plug-in. The reverberation is smooth and the delay flows. Good. The point is, I can't see any option to dirty up the sound. As usual, modern plugins emulate the machine as it was engineered originally but (of course) they can't simulate ALL the applications that the analog version may have, never ever the most crazy and unpredictable. They simulate the original but don't stimulate as the original.

I owned a real Space Echo for a while and I never used it as a delay or reverb. It's a crazy effect, it makes anything fed sound fatter and fedback. And yes...it sounds Industrial!

And again the score is: Digital 1 - Analog 2

I'm not saying you should get a real Space Echo...well...yes I'm saying that! And make sure the tape is not new :)