Plate reverb is a sound engineer’s staple, imparting depth and texture to tracks. This effect mimics a vibrating metal plate’s repercussions, adding warmth and density to recordings, a feat software can finally emulate. Its smooth decay and rich quality enhance clarity without overshadowing the original signal. This balance has cemented its place in audio production, offering a bright, shimmering quality rarely seen in more conventional reverbs caused by the metallic qualities of the vibrating plates.
The digital realm’s renaissance of plate reverb underscores its timeless appeal. This guide’ll cover everything you need to know about plate reverb, including setting up the ideal plate reverb chain, its conventional and creative uses, and more advanced mixing and sound design strategies.
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Setting Up Plate Reverb for Optimal Effect
When we’re lost in the creative flow, we’re usually throwing proverbial paint at the wall as we shuffle through as many different ideas as possible in hopes that one sound design move or mixing decision will kickstart a new wave of inspiration that brings us closer to the finish line of the track. But this often burns as much daylight as it saves, and with a bit more methodical pre-planning, we can set ourselves up for success and achieve better results using plate reverbs (or any plugin-in really).
Don’t Forget The Pre-Delay!
Pre-delay in reverb marks the time between the end of the original sound and the onset of its initial echoes. Picture this: you’re shouting across a large hall. The pause before the echo surfaces is the pre-delay. It occurs as sound waves travel and reflect off distant walls, not so much from nearer ones like the floor or ceiling. Adjusting the pre-delay alters the room’s perceived size, enhancing clarity in your mix. This adjustment ensures a distinct separation between the sound and its reverb.
Pre-delay, through a singular parameter, is often the last new producers tweak when scrolling through presets or creating a reverb effect from scratch.
Later, we’ll explore some practical uses for this parameter. For now, just remember that it’s worthwhile to spend a few moments adjusting the pre-delay while configuring your plate reverb to achieve the desired effect.
An essential tip: Avoid isolating the reverb when listening. Pre-delay might sound odd and disjointed in solo but blends seamlessly, adding rhythm and movement when integrated into the whole mix.
Many modern reverbs offer tempo-synced options, enabling you to align the timing of reverbs to the grid. However, we’ve found that this often hampers more mixes than it helps. Trust your ears when adjusting this parameter, and you’ll achieve a more musical and natural movement in the reverb. This is where Superplate stands out; they don’t provide specific timings, encouraging you to rely on your ears – their unique X-Factor.
Separate It From The Source
To subtly enhance your source sound without overwhelming it, consider using plate reverb on a parallel send or channel. This technique lets you fine-tune the reverb settings and levels while maintaining the original sound’s dryness and gives an entirely different result than simply adjusting the Dry/Wet on the reverb plugin to taste. It’s an effective way to add spatial depth and texture to your mix, keeping the source sound prominent.
For Ableton users, splitting the signal with an audio effects rack, as shown above, is an efficient method to achieve this with just a few clicks. However, nearly every modern DAW offers auxiliary sends and return channels. These channels enable you to route multiple instruments from your project, creating a unified acoustic space that the reverb simulates. This approach not only adds depth but also unifies the mix.
Separating the reverb onto its own channel also allows you to manipulate the reverb independently of the source sound. We’ll delve deeper into this in the latter sections of the article, so for now let’s use this as a transition into the final details of setting up your plate reverb!
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Tune The Reverb
All reverbs uniquely color and enhance their source sounds; plate reverb, with its bright and metallic timbres, is no exception. All too often, amateur mixes become washed out and muddy due to reverb, as it adds a significant amount of sonic dust to the mix. Utilizing filtering and EQ techniques can effectively confine the reverb’s frequency range, preventing conflicts with high-percussion sounds and avoiding muddiness in the bass frequencies.
A common error among new producers is overdoing the EQ and filtering adjustments with multiple surgical cuts and narrow-Q removals, leading to an unnatural reverb sound and a mix that feels too mechanical. This is where tools like Soundtoys’ Superplate plugin excel. They offer simple filter cutoffs that effectively create frequency brackets, allowing the reverb to occupy its ideal space in the mix while having enough cross-over to sound natural and authentic. At this stage, less is more, and the Superplate enables quick, effective adjustments with broad, uncomplicated strokes.
Applications of Plate Reverb
Plate Reverbs For More Emotional Vocals
Because of the unique timbre and characteristics that plate reverb brings to the mix, it can elevate your mix’s vocals, bringing a dynamic and intimate quality to the performance that makes the vocal POP out of the mix while simultaneously making it sink into the music. Soundtoys’ Superplate, with its diverse plate emulations across every generation of plate reverb, is a prime example. It offers a range of depth and spatial effects, creating a more flexible and expansive sound for vocals that you can dial in to get just as retro or as modern of a sound as you need. This ability to manipulate perceived space and depth adds a unique dimension to the vocal mix, making it stand out.
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Filtering is crucial in refining the reverb effect, especially around the 180 Hertz frequency. By carefully filtering out this specific part of the sound spectrum, you can significantly influence the overall quality and clarity of the vocal reverb, allowing for the deeper and more resonant frequency bands to hit the listener in the chest (and thus, the feels) while allowing the upper frequencies to sound spacious and multi-dimensional. This nuanced control provides a more polished and professional-sounding mix.
Additionally, experimenting with mono and stereo plate reverbs offers varying auditory experiences. Mono reverbs can add a distinct texture to the vocal, while stereo reverbs contribute to a broader soundscape, enriching the vocal track.
Plate Reverbs On Drums
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The EMT 140 is celebrated for its distinctively metallic quality, which may be perceived as unusually bright by today’s standards. This characteristic makes the Superplate an ideal tool for drum mixing.
The reverb’s brilliance and presence can make elements like snares, hi-hats, and entire drum buses come to forefront of the mix. Unlike other reverbs that might blend a sound into the background, the EMT 140 emulation in Superplate ensures that your drums have a noticeable presence and clarity. Adding a short decay and applying a high-shelf boost with an analog EQ emulation like Soundtoys’ SieQ can impart a concise, shimmering quality to your percussion, making it stand out without sounding too bright or brittle.
This mixing technique is well-established, with notable historical examples. Pink Floyd’s engineers famously used this approach on their track “Time,” where the reverb was utilized to emphasize the snare and hi-hat in a mix that could have otherwise appeared washed out and whimsical. This is a prime example of how the Superplate, with its EMT 140 emulation, can effectively accentuate and define drum sounds in a mix.
Unconventional Uses of Plate Reverb
Reverb As An Aesthetic
The EMT-240, despite its brief availability as a hardware unit, left a lasting impact on the sound of reverb, now described as adding almost a warm and nostalgic sheen to the music it was used on. Its iconic sound is now replicable through various means, with the “Goldfoil 240” setting on Soundtoys’ Superplate plugin being a standout example. Superplate excels in adding texture and color to a mix, striking a perfect balance between a LoFi texture and a warm, inviting aesthetic.
This unique reverb sound is particularly suitable for producers who create laid-back LoFi beats and want to imbue their tracks with space and texture. It’s also ideal for those aiming to evoke the retro-Americana, soft-rock vibe often called ‘Yacht Rock.’ The distinctive quality of this reverb setting helps your work stand out, offering a fresh alternative to the more common stock or conventional third-party reverb plugins. It’s a tool that can distinctly define the aesthetic of a record, making it an essential element for producers seeking to create a specific mood or atmosphere in their music.
Plate Reverb On VSTs
The digital nature of most common synths used these days is that they are infinitely modular and precise. Compare this to the randomness of hardware, filled with anomalies caused by warming circuits and faulty internals, and the contrast is night and day.
Just a touch of plate reverb can help smooth out those blatant perfections that plague the world of softsynths, adding a touch of space and texture that can instantly make digital synths sound believably analog.
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Sidechaining The Plate Reverb To Vocals
As mentioned earlier, placing your reverb on an auxiliary channel or separating it from the source audio opens up numerous creative possibilities for further processing and using additional plugins. A particularly effective technique is sidechaining the reverb to the dry signal. This approach allows the reverb to interact dynamically with the source signal, creating a rhythmic relationship.
This technique is especially impactful on vocal tracks. When the vocalist stops singing, the compressor has no input, allowing the reverb to swell and fill the space behind the performance. This creates a captivating call-and-response effect between the vocals and the reverb. However, when implementing this on a track, it’s crucial to set your compressor to ‘pre-effects.’ This ensures that the dry signal, rather than the end-of-chain signal, triggers the compressor.
Advanced Strategies: Modulating Plate Reverb
The internet era has birthed the phenomenon of heavily affected music; reverb is just one layer of the incredibly nuanced music that has become the industry standard across many genres and sects of the production space. The movement and modulation options baked into Superplate will be the true X-Factor here, as the life, character, and movement it introduces to the mix turns the musicality to eleven.
The Superplate single-handedly has the power to start a new trend that not only underscores reverb’s pervasive influence but also hints at its potential future directions in the soundscape of music, one where the mix itself, the entire soul and backbone of a record, enters a sort of push-and-pull dance with the music itself when dialed in correctly.
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Final Thoughts
Plate reverb is a game-changer in sound engineering, offering depth, warmth, and texture that’s hard to match. Tools like Soundtoys’ Superplate capture this essence brilliantly, allowing for a wide range of sonic possibilities, from subtle ambiance to bold effects. This guide has shown how to harness plate reverb’s unique timbres for innovative sound design and mixing strategies, making it a crucial tool for any mix.
The versatility of plate reverb, as demonstrated by the Superplate plugin, is unmatched. Emulating classics like the EMT 140 and EMT-240 and many others, it brings a distinct character to vocals and drums, enhancing the mix’s overall aesthetic. Whether adding emotional depth to vocals or clarity to drums, plate reverb is indispensable. Its evolution in the digital age points to an exciting future, promising new, creative ways to shape music’s soundscape.
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