Why Huge Metal Plates Are on SO Many Songs (reverb machines)
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Audio mix by Rob Ruccia of Uptown Recording: www.uptownrecording.com/
Audio at Reverb recorded by Michael Lux: reverb.com/
Audio at Electrical Audio recorded by Sam Grant of The Good Stuff: / thegoodstuff
Video shot & edited by Jake Jarvi: / pineappleboyfilms
*corrections:
- It’s Accutronics not Accusonics
What the plate picked up while we were getting the thumbnail photo
• What the plate reverb ...
This video was made possible because of Patreon support from Rob Harper, Hypergnome, Fabio, Ben Swan, Isaac Briefer, ricin, rd1994, Sheldon Bird, Yaroslav Yermilov, Jack Cahillane, Denis Lachapelle, Kevin Harris, Jonathan Olejniczak, Fuad Ghazali, and many other awesome people on my Patreon page: / robscallon
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Rob, let us sing you the song of our people.
Yes! Omg!
SING!
No
Says every cat at 3am.
Ahhh yes Reverb😌
Someone needs to reupload this, but every time someone says “reverb” the reverb gets more intense
After the 15th time the whole video just sounds like being in a pool, inside an opera house, surrounded by metal plates, suspended on springs, while inside a tornado.
@@8thlvlMage bring it on!
This is an amazing idea. I'd do it right now if I had the ability.
@@8thlvlMage 15th? Maybe earlier
it just gradually decends into earrape, especially when the actual reverberated guitar happens.
Fun fact... The blaster sound in Star Wars was basically spring reverb... They used a hammer on a guy wire.
I grew up out in the boonies of southern Idaho - one of my solo amusements was making blaster noises on the guy wires holding high-tension electric line poles in place.
Strongly recommend this podcast episode about all of those sounds and their origins: www.20k.org/episodes/pewpew Great podcast all around if you like audio.
Motown records first "reverb" was indeed the bathroom. There are a few rare records where a flush snuck through. EMT also made the best commercial record players in the world. EMT ST 930. Still the most advanced rim drive record player in the world. Was tested in Japan against the "best" in the hifi world @ the time. No contest ,the EMT blew all competition into dust & made them look & sound like the sad pretentious plastic toys they are. Designed for continuous play and 20 year life span with flawless fidelity.
So it wasn't Scandinavian thinn ice skiing?
A cable reverb, interesting.
1:59 I can attest to that as a violin student, a violin on a dry room sounds like a depressing whisper, on a reverby room (Not just the exagerated ones like a church but a good sized room) it's loud and imposing.
That is also true for modern vocal recordings. The sound is recorded so dry that it sounds like absolute crap, no matter how good the singer is. Then the audio engineer switches on the effects chain which includes reverb and delay and it sounds amazing.
I play string bass (started out on violin, though). And for some reason, a gymnasium amplifies a string bass like tenfold! Hard to hear myself when playing in a concert band. But then in the gymnasium we used to play in, I would actually have to play quieter, because of this! (And the reverb on the string bass ruled! 🙂)
“You probably don’t have access to a cave to record in.” *approaching norwegian black metal noises
*tremolo picking intensifies
@@anthonyo7591 "Misirlou plays in the distance"
@@vincentlamb3436 what a fucking twist
Best comment lol
Bathcave
46:15 "sees a pluckable object" Rob: D J E N T
I just started this video, scrolled down while listening for a minute, and went aghast that I just clicked on a 53-minute video without realizing it until I see your timestamp. Welp, it *is* Rob Scallon, so I guess I'm just not going to go back to working for the rest of my shift.
@@Gruncival been there done that eh
A tiny Motograter.
When I studied Audio Engineering we used the fire escape to create a staircase reverb, by dropping a speaker at the bottom and recording on the top floor.
We did the same when recording background vocals & harmonies for Playground many years ago at SAE when it was in St. Kilda, Melbourne 1 mic on the level we were recording on, and got the softer singers to stand on the upper levels of the fire escape, and progressivley moved the louder singers down the fire escape landings to get the right blend, It wasn't the only wild & wacky technique used, but the were all fun to play with. Apparently Neil Young got a particular guitar sound he liked By taping a petrol funnel over his guitar amp speaker, and then ran it down several metres of hose that had a mic taped up to the other end Reverb is a natural sound, and it's carbon nuetral ;-) I say, use it whenever you can
I'm generally pretty skeptical about the difference between "authentic" physical effects and their digital companions, but I have to admit that there's something incredible about the simple sound of that plate reverb. As a materials scientist, it makes me quite interested in the properties of the steel, the transducer, etc. that makes such a unique impulse response.
Also makes me curious about the effect of the length and arrangement of the metal “crystals” with the current metal fabrication techniques
And also now that I remember: cryo hardening!
Ugh.
The plate isn't perfect, can't be. The digital reproduction of reverb can be perfect, but you could program in some imperfections, but there's going to be a wide gap between the two. I think it's like the "warmness" in Vinyl, it's due to random imperfections of the material and reading of the material that's very hard to get right digitally. I'm sure you could get close with a very weird and very convoluted process, maybe even a neural net trained on an actual plate, but it's just so much easier to use a big old plate.
@@CommonApathy still people can't tell the difference in blind tests. So there isn't any meaningful difference.
rob: *moves amp by millimeters* must be broken jim: nah it's not broken look. *punches amp* *_s p r i n g s e i z u r e_*
*laughs echoing in garden hose*
I just love the deadpan delivery "I thought it was broken" _flick, _*_WHACK_*
Tshow I fixed my xbox
i upload music song
@@SKKhandokar I uploaded a dead crow
Wow, it’s amazing that Jim is not only a reverb expert, but a reverb expert as well. Fair play
XD
i upload music song
🤣😆😂🤘🏼✌🏻👊🏻👊🏻
*Reverb expert
He really does it all.
Rob, I'm an old guy, I've seen a lot, and what I love about you is that you remind me in some ways of Frank Zappa. Not the crazy part, but the musician part. Zappa could play almost any instrument and you have that same kind of love of and fascination with music! You love every aspect of it, you don't just want to play guitar... you want to learn everything about everything. You don't want to just play an electric guitar you want to know everything about every type of guitar and you want to help other people understand that too. Without a doubt you run the absolute best guitar channel on KZhead. I watch others and some of them are great for specific things like how to repair a guitar, or the best comparisons, but for overall knowledge I love to watch your channel. It's never boring. It's always fascinating, and I've sat through really long videos which seem to go so quickly that I was amazed. So whatever you do please don't stop!
When I was a young kid, my grandparents had a new 1966 Mercury Monterey that had a spring reverb for the radio from the factory. It was turned on or off by a floor switch next to the headlight dimmer switch. If you turned it on and drove over a rough road the springs would pop and twang through the speakers. I was fascinated by the sound effect. I have never seen another installation like it since. I love that some artists are going back to the old school electromechanical effects. Some things just can't be reproduced by computers.
Thank you so much for sharing this! That's so dang cool...
Who would ever have guessed that an old car radio would have a 100% analog (and obsolete but awesome) spring reverb? Thanks for sharing! You only learn these specific kind of random things through people sharing their experiences from the past, there's no other way any of us would ever have learned about a 1966 Mercury car radio's reverb function!
Rob.. I think it's cool how your channel has evolved from just making music to showing us a much more in-depth and very cool side of musical history. You got a LOT of original content here man.. it's it's fn quality.
i'm no fanboy but i honestly can't imagine why anyone doesn't like this guy.
Watching these videos really remind me of why I started playing guitar and working on music. That passion is very real.
My man over here speaking the truth
I wanted to give this comment a thumbs up, but I didn’t want to break the perfect 666.
@@RichardBronosky Feel ya.. but even the thought of such a shameful act, is all in the past now!😉
12:29 - The smirk on this guy's face when he realizes what he needs to do lol, no hesitation either
I remember one of my friends, who created the very first audio plugin for reverb. Not on his own, another nerd helped him writing the code. He has a small studio, and to his surprise his audio software had a number of plugins, except a reverb. Brilliant guys, never giving up, and giving their plugin away. For musicians living on a tight budget, public domain software is such a good thing.
Thank you for the likes. But the real guys who deserve likes, have posted this video here!
Artists who freely share advice, technology, and techniques are the foundation of the world
I’ve known about “plate” reverbs all my life but never SAW one or really understood how they worked. Thanks! In the mid 70s the singing group I travelled with carried a 4 foot tall “spring” reverb. Touch it, and it sounded like a bomb had gone off!
0:12 "It gives those sounds, space" Or what a cultured person say "𝐴 𝑀 𝐵 𝐼 𝑂 𝑈 𝑁 𝐶 𝐸"
A M B I O U N C E
Kmac reference?
This tone is essential for when you PLAY MUSIC
@@RemstageMusic *proceeds to play while sounding like a radiator*
Ambience, is how a cultured person SPELLS it...
I love how as soon as he said “you can play the springs!” Rob went straight for some Djent
"i wish we had a drumset, i didnt think we would be doing anything like this!"
He said weirdest Les Claypool band.... I got Justin Chancellor vibes... Vibes! 😂
This is an INCREDIBLE piece of work, man...you ask the right questions, do the right "experiments". THANK YOU!! I'm an Aerospace Engineer/Physicist that is amateurishly dangerous with music and hardware...and you have exposed the heart of the reverb subject: physics of waves, and using electrical signal processing to fu$k with it in such cool, expressive ways. You weave the thread of history perfectly with this line of thought. Wow. I'm jealous of the fun you had!!😁🤓😁🤓
I learned from Rick Beato that the guitar sound on Van Halen I was recorded as the guitar's dry signal panned hard to one side, and the reverb panned hard in the other, and this is one of the reasons the single guitar track sounds as full as it does. Very cool video, Rob, as always.
That, and Eddie's awesome approach to rhythm.
12:26 has to be one of my favourite deadpan deliveries EVER xD
*click* *smash*
that was great lol
Room reverb - 3d Plate reverb - 2d Spring reverb - 1d Wow
Gets me thinking about the challenges of doing reverb for game development, where you're trying to recreate an environment without melting the player's CPU.
@@Roxor128 Probably a factor towards the push of multithreading CPUs and almost a norm of 8 cores
Would that make using all of them at the same time or looped together 6D.??
Calculating reverb would be much more efficient on the GPU instead of multithreading it on the CPU. John Lin has implemented a ray-tracing style reverb in his voxel game that he's working on, this guy works for NVidia or Epic or something. Check out his youtube.
@@michaelmoore8680 i think you just get 3d reverb pro max
2 and a half minutes in my mind is already blown. I love how you go into these things kinda blank and let the knowledge wash over you. You're also incredibly apt at both finding the right people to explain these concepts and asking the exact correct questions to nudge it out of them. Also on topic: I once accidentally drank an entire bottle of vanilla flavoured rum and ended up playing my guitar on the toilet and it sounded amazing. Always thought it was the rum, but now I'm gonna retcon that into attributing it to the reverb.
This is just the coolest. Thank you so much Rob & Jim & the team. ✌💗
I’m watching a video about reverb with a guy from reverb in a large room, making the audio reverberate. The ultimate reverberation
You sir, have officially won the internet with this single comment.
Unlimited reverb
Reverberation
Cursed
and im vibing
"once I start playing guitar, I could be here for 28 hours" Dude really got a thing for the number 28
Texas.
Texas.
I mean, it is a perfect number.
@@cobalt._.27 What? plz develop.. : )
@@jae_lee- What? plz develop.. : )
One of the best videos I’ve seen in a long time. Would love to see more of these deep dives into audio production equipment
You need your own coffee table reverb. It's just like one of the big plates, except smaller and laid horizontally when in use so you can put your feet on it and manipulate the reverb while you play guitar. Then slap a tabletop on it for protection when not in use, unless you want to stand it up on end and store it that way.
Sharktank!!!
"Reverb is the ultimate shaper of vibe; it IS the vibe of what you're listening to." As a drummer, my cymbals would like a word.
You mean your circular reverb plates? :)
@@batsatx Holy shit, you're right
Let's face it. You're a glorified complicated metronome.
Drum machines might have no soul. But they also never fuck my girlfriend
I already told you I'm sorry@@Ottophil
This is going to be great.
The legend himself speaks!
W
It was.
What are you doing here? Don't you have to do a Blue Yeti Review?
I'd like to _echo_ that sentiment.
THIS IS SO GREAT! Please keep making more videos like this! It's so interesting to learn about how music mechanics and history interact.
the best ever made doc about reverb! thanks so much Rob, Jim and Greg!
"It gives those sounds, S P A C E"
Thought I was watching an Adam Neely vid for a second
@@MrCocktaiI I totally thought the same xD
I remember when my first band went into a friends basement studio to record for the first time on a reel to reel (in the mid-80s). . . he didn't have any extra decks or affects so we did all the vocals standing in the bathtub to get the natural reverb - it actually worked out good enough to get our stuff on the local university radio station . . .
Paul McCartney used to practice in his dads bog for the same reasons.
Got any recordings man?
@@pocketpicker6613 he talked about it during his carpool karaoke bit
@@pocketpicker6613 Unfortunately - all of my memories from those days are gone . . . lost years ago, the story is too long to explain.
@@jtorola I should've been more specific. I was addressing the OP.
God i love these videos where you’re exploring different sounds and instruments. It’s so fascinating! I am not a musician but as someone who’s very sound centric these are heaven
I really did not expect to sit down for the full hour long video but it kept me interested with all the different types of reverb you played with, really shows you how much it affects your favourite music.
50 minutes of Rob just massively nerding out over vibrating springs and plates? Yes please and thank you very much!
My procrastination 100% approved by boss.
This reminds me of those toy microphones you could buy at a toy store. I used to be so fascinated by them as a kid. But it's just a spring inside of a plastic casing. Which is still kind of fascinating.
This is the best video I have seen this year! thank you for doing this.
What a great interview. So much hands on information. I soaked up every nerdy 🤓 reverb knowledge I never knew I needed. Thanks 😊
I'm a sheet metal worker, mostly making and hanging ductwork, but whenever I get my hands on a flat piece of sheet metal I always ripple it to make the noise. It's crazy how many different noises or reverbs you can get from different sizes of metal and the amount of ripple you put into it. This all of course without instruments, they add a whole nother level.
Same here. Work with sheet metal making aerospace parts. A nice piece of thin stainless is so much fun.
i upload music song
My basement has galvanized ductwork for the furnace/AC units. Very sensitive to certain frequencies of percussive or explosive sounds like shouts or hand claps. Makes for a really cool huge snare reverb.
You mean HVAC worker? We always made our own plenums and ducts. But yeah I think we all do when we get some sheet metal
Can you convince your boss to let you attach actuators to them and upload the videos to KZhead “for marketing”?
When he casually switched on the reverb tank and pounded on it. 😂 Spring + Plate at the same time reminds me of the cave parts of “2112” by Rush.
See i was getting 2112 from just the plate, but im also listening through phone
What can this strange device be. It really sounds close
i upload music song
I thought of rush also instantly when I heard these sounds, an epiphany even, ah that’s how they did it.
wow. the unexpected demo of the moisturizer that i never actually searched for but now i need, thanks! 🤩
What a watch. Great chemistry between you two, and Jim is fascinating!
53 minutes? No way I can watch all of that! *Watches the whole thing* I NEED TO BUILD A PLATE REVERB IN MY BASEMENT NOW.
I'm hoping my downstairs neighbors will let me build a big plate and keep it in their living room for my reverb needs.
If only McMaster sold 4x8 sheets of steel... All I can find are 4x4.
Already acquired a pallet of the right ratios. And have just about everything else. Just need to put it all together. Probably be able to drive it with a pair of 6AU6s...lol
I started building mine too…
31:32 why did the cameraman urging Rob to face the camera with just one finger make me laugh so hard hahaha
I had to search the comments for someone mentioning that lol
I stumbled upon this randomly and I am extremely happy that I did. Awesome stuff guys!!!! 🤘😎🤘 Rock On
That part where he uses the faders back n forth with the Spring and plate is absolutely beautiful. The frequencies they accentuate give the reverb a melody of its own
It made a spring noi- BANGOIOING
I have worked in a studio with a 12 foot long spring reverb unit. It had 4 springs inside of different lengths/properties, and you could mix between them. The studio also had a corridor down the back of the main room with sliding doors along it so you could customise the room reverb. It was a former TV studio, so they would have been used to add atmosphere to scenes.
I *love* these types of videos! Thanks so much, Rob. 👍🏻✌🏻
This is such a fantastic blast of music fun. Great work all involved. 🤘
I really love how Rob is doing Bill Nye type videos for musicians. I absolutely love this content.
And the fact that he doesn't act like Bill Nye.
i was literally relaxing and then 12:31 im fuckin ded lol
BONK
This was AWESOME! Thanks Rob and Reverb.
This was really interesting and entertaining 👍 Jim seems to be mixing the words "mechanical" and "analoge" as a signal can be completely analoge while staying electronic. Digital is when the ones and zeroes enters the building 👍
I came here looking for this comment.
@@beachton good to see I'm not the only one 😁
Everything except the actual waves in air are analogies to sound. Wether it is electric, mechanical, magnetical or numerical is secondary. Digital is analog.
I love this guy's energy. He's so fun and happy to be there.
The two of them are so perfect together.
Even though I knew most of this, watching them talk about it made me feel like a kid again re-discovering all this cool stuff :)
12:20 the comedic timing of *flick* 'BOOM' cracks me up
Agreed
Saw a stratocaster with a pickup mounted below the tremolo springs to get a reverb signal straight from the guitar. It worked!
That sounds awesome
These vids are super informative and interesting! You kick ass Rob!
wow nobody mentioned that's Steve Albini's studio and Rob is using one of his (or studio's) Wedge guitar, that's so cool forget about reverb I wanna see those archival tapes
Yes!!! I was just checking the messages to see if anyone else noticed that. Way more exciting to me than everything else, and everything else is awesome! The alt rock history in that guys hands, and it doesn't get a mention. Crazy.
At least a passing mention would've been cool...
Not sure who that is (my music knowledge is terrible), but I did notice the nice Travis Bean. These weren't made for very long or in very large numbers.
@@diydylana3151 I'll definitely look him up!
I was also looking at those archival tapes wanting to see what’s on them. They looks so abandoned and I wish they wouldn’t leave that to simply rot away. There’s gotta be some interesting stuff recorded there.
12:26 might be the hardest I’ve laughed in my life lol
Just watched your trailer for Guitar Quest.. EPIC!!! Id get the course just to watch you do you. Really enjoy your videos. Rock On 🤘
The dynamic between Rob and Jim is great. Truly enjoyable to watch. Jim's excitement about what he does is palpable.
Everything from 39:00 onward, with the spring reverbs - 100% Silent Hill Vibes. I want those pedals now.
As a cigar box guitar builder one of my favorite tricks is adding a few different sized springs into a box to get a rich deep reverb out of a small cigar box guitar. It has a tendency to make them sound as though they have a bit more resonance and it REALLY shines with a disk piezo in the box to amplify it. This makes me want to try to add a mechanical switch that could dampen or stretch the spring while playing to mess with the sound...
I have a guitar with an overstretched tremolo spring, gives it a cool natural reverb when playing it unplugged.
I like that twist on the idea! Now for my next stupid project, I'm gonne build me a box full of springs With some pickups, a neck, guitar strings, and some switchable physical dampners. I need another musical instrument I have no hope of learning how to play.
Great content. Man, I wish KZhead was loaded with videos of this quality in every regard; historical, educational, context & overall production. Just a great vibe & video all around. Excellent job gents!
Awesome explanation and visuals!! Thank you !!
This type of content, this "history and mechanics of effects you know and love", is soooo interesting. Please make more of these! This helps me as an amateur audio engineer to use these effects better and more intentionally.
19:52 That Vibrato machine is just an experience! The vibing is deep!
Wonderful, very interesting, love these video types that you've been doing, Cheers !
I love this video I’d love to see this become a series exploring the history of different effects
Seeing him so happy while he's playing made me happy
He called the company "Accusonics," but its actual name is Accutronics. They started out based in my home state of Wisconsin, USA.
Appreciate that correction. So close, yet so far.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to point that out.
This was awesome, I really learned a lot! Thanks for the content.
#1: Holy cow I love the sound of the metal plate. The guitar chords with it were so pretty ^w^ #2: It fascinated me how scratching the springs had such an awesome industrial hard rock/metal (no pun intended) sound to it, that was really cool but weird at the same time. #3: Jim, your videos are amazing, and I love how much we learn from you! Thank you! :D
Oh how I missed these videos. These videos are easily my favorite content of yours. I like learning the history and stuff behind things we hear all the time.
This is so interesting! The history behind all the knobs that I use on a daily basis. Makes more sense and I actually appreciate what I'm doing now.
What a treat of history, sights and sounds. Thanks!!!
Fun fact: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop made the original TARDIS sound effect by dragging a key over a spring with a few analog effects. They also used analog synth to do many other effects and the soundtrack. Good vibes.
These videos are so much more fun, engaging and informative than I’d find a “real” video on the history of reverb to be. Keep up the great work Rob, these videos where you check out weird musical stuff are the best!
I love how I could just cross my legs on my desk and recline my chair without any ads disturbing me. PS - Jim is awesome. He one of those guys who just loves what he’s doing.
Can’t hide it. Not gonna deny it.
i upload music song
Weird. I have ads.
Now that you've said it. . . I don't remember any annoying ads disturbing this one either.
I got an ad the second I skipped
that was awesome. thank you!
Such nice guys and lots of new information about reverbs. Thanx :)
That light pedal sounds dank as hell! And the moisturiser... man everything about this is cool af!
Both of those are relatively recent - but agreed - awesome! I was looking at them last week and its great to see them showup here!
Apart from this being one of the most complete overviews of what reverb is and has been that I have ever seen, I love how giddy everyone is from getting to meet and interact with actual people irl. This inspires, both musically and emotionally. Thank you!
Man, this was so nice and interesting to watch! Did not know that the plate and spring were/are used so much like this. The sounds are super familiar from so many songs.
One of the most interesting videos I've seen in awhile pretty awesome I did not know this existed, thank you
Watching the plate reverb while soldering a guitar pedal thinking "I'm gonna need a bigger box."
The way Rob looks into Jim’s eyes as he played the guitar with the reverb for the first time, literally melted my little heart 🥰
Dude, thank you for this video. This is history, ingenuity, and hopefully the future. This is what the kids need to know. I appreciate watching you guys just play with sound.
This is the coolest video I have seen online in a long time. Fantastic, I love learning and enjoying at the same time. I always knew the bathroom was the original reverb machine but am suprise in the plate. I always knew of the "Spring" reverb my Dad had in his old Fender amp. Ya bump it and Dad would go nuts ROFL. Way cool man.
Love how this guy narrates, so passionate and knowledgeable
Imagine if you're at church trying to meditate and pray, and then Rob Scallon comes in, says "space" and leaves
The plate reverb sounds incredible, beautiful and just so authentic. I gotta hear some Midwest Emo with that haha. Awesome episode heard & learned a lot!
This is SUPER COOL man. Real plate reverb is amazing! It can be emulated sort of but emulations can't really capture all of the tonality and ambulate frequencies. Just so nice. Amazing looking guitar too, Rob
My mom used to be in a church music program and they’d practice in a massive room. And this brought me wayyyyy back to when she used to bring me with her.
sounds nice
Recently picked up guitar and bought Guitar Quest, it is an absolute blast! I’m glad to learn guitar from my favorite music KZheadr
Honestly one of the most interesting videos I’ve seen! That external spring unit would be super fun to play with.
Yet another amazing video Rob! :) Really great stuff.