Hall reverb? plate?

[TimWaldvogel]

Has anybody built a hall reverb ? How difficult is this and is it worth it? I don't want a spring reverb. Please help I am not finding anything about this one. I was looking for A g.g.g. Reverb but it says it's discontinued. Please help

[PRR]

What the hall is a "hall reverb"?

Unless you mean put a speaker at one end of a hallway and a mike at the other end. This IS how many-many fine recordings were done. Good studios had a sealed room of odd proportions. Cheap studios did it in the hallway or in the men's room. (There's a story about using the ladies room....)

My other thought is a Hall Effect pickup. But I can't think of _any_ Hall Effect pickups in audio..... mmmmm, maybe one phono pickup which never went anywhere.

[TimWaldvogel]

Ok what you mean by the pickup. I have always had a whacky effect idea to put a very small speaker in a box literally ighe above a cheap humbucker I have and wired that as a effect

[Nasse]

Belton reverb module seems to be available. Don´t know if ggg kit is temporarily or totally out of stock

Have you considered digital one? DSP section might have some info, some kits available on some sources too but bit expensive

[Taylor]

"Hall" reverb will always be digital. The Spin FV-1 is the way to go here. Much better than the Belton IMO. It has 2 reverbs in the built-in ROM, so you don't need to do anything with programming if that scares you. Tonepad has a PCB for it.

[DC9V]

I have always had a whacky effect idea to put a very small speaker in a box literally ighe above a cheap humbucker I have and wired that as a effect

I suspect that wouldn't work for a reverb. A humbucker would only pick up the electromagnetic waves emitted by the speaker, which wouldn't reverberate inside the box, right? You'd need to use a microphone.

[Mark Hammer]

What is generally thought of as a "hall" reverb involves the production of a great many different reflections (or simulations thereof).  They will likely have different filtering to mimic the loss of high frequency energy when sound travels greater distances, and conceivably differential filtering for different reflections.

This is complex enough that it is very awkward to do in the analog domain, not to mention costly and bulky.  The simplest way to achieve a "hall"-like reverberation is to either look around the used gear stores or your local kijiji for gear from the 90's (I bought my Lexicon MPX-100 and Behringer Virtualizer Pro for $50 each) or explore one of the DSP chips like the FV-1.

[TimWaldvogel]

Well if anybody is selling a reverb pedal for semicheap let me know. And how would you make an analog spring reverb. Lush sounding like the wetfx one, or the spring chicken

[KazooMan]

I can add my own personal, admittedly biased, tin-eared, poor guitar player's opinion.

I grew up on the sound of the original Fender spring reverb.  I have a mid-sixties copy in mint condition.  I bang on guitar through the reverb into an early 60's blonde 1X12 Fender Bandmaster with the tone ring using a '65 Fender Mustang (yes, I was a Fender guy in my youth). 

To me there is no sound quite like that produced by the original Fender reverbs.  Just for fun I built a clone of my reverb using currently available components.  I did use a three spring tank rather than the two spring tank of the original.  Each of the two units has its own specific sound (voice).  The original reverb sounds "better" to me.  The clone does not improve when I connect the vintage tank.  I have a hard time trying to describe the difference between the two reverbs.  What I am drawn to say is that the clone has a "sharp or edgy" aspect to the reverb sound.  It is not as pleasant as the original.

So.... I also built a pedal based on the Tonepad layout for the Spinsemi FV-1 chip.  This wasn't easy using the SMD Spinsemi IC, but I was successful.  All of the combinations of reverb, chorus, flange, octave, etc. of the Spinsemi chip work, but I much prefer my original Fender reverb and my Small Clone Chorus.

[PRR]

> a "hall" reverb involves the production of a great many different reflections

OK, that was too obvious for me.

Simple: rent a large nice room. One that sounds good. One without trucks moaning outside.

If you want that type sound in a box less than 40+ feet each way.... that's annoyingly tough.

The classic fake is a very live ~~20' room. Still won't fit in the gig-bag.

There were plans, and one commercial product, based on a 50-foot garden hose. Put sound in, it comes out later. Losses and coloration are major problems. They sound like a garden hose.

The Hammond Spring Reverb was a revolution. It isn't as good as a Real Room, more like two 50 foot sewer pipes. But it was about the size of a filing cabinet, later reduced to like a carton of cigarettes. Inside is a "Slinky". If you stretch a Slinky, and pluck it, you can watch the wave travel end to end and back. The high mass and low stiffness give a speed-of-sound very much slower than air. A "large air distance" and reflections can be approximated in about a foot of space.

> how would you make an analog spring reverb

You buy the reverb tank. (DIY is possible but it took AT&T and Hammond decades to find the tricks, Accutronics/Belton will sell that product for $35.) You feed it with a part-Watt power amp, you pick up the weak output with like a guitar preamp. You normally need a mixer to blend reverb with the direct signal. When reverb was new, it was like adding a small Fender Champ to your chassis. With chips you can do it in a few bucks and square inches.

> reverb pedal

The Spring Reverb is very mechanical, small jiggles in a loose spring. It generally must be well isolated from all external vibration. In studio use we often moved the spring to a closet so nobody would bump it. In stage-amps the tank is carefully positioned and usually inside a padded bag. Even so if you bump the amp hard the spring goes "bOIIIINNNGGGggggg....! It is probably not wise to stomp on it. (Also the least-lush short tank is far larger than the average pedal.) I know such things exist.

With digital conversion of analog signals, and digital storage, we can in principle emulate any acoustic distance delay reflection situation. Of course a good approximation takes more parts, and more thought, than a cheezy approximation. You may know the BBD boxes, which have so little storage and complexity that they do Darth Vader garbling better than they do "reverberation". With RAM chips as cheap as chips, better things are possible. I have spent hours programming the dimensions and absorptions of our Chapel into a computer. The results were never as ear-tickling complex as the actual room (which I knew too well), but it was better than nada when I was forced to close-mike a performance which needed big-room blend.

In this 21st century, either (like Kazoo) you are In Love with the spring reverb (preferably tube-driven), or you try all the $69-$399 digital boxes in the Banjo Center (or as Mark says, the once-costly Lexicon machines now clotting the pawnshops). If you want to DIY, the FV-1 or the Belton module ought to keep you busy a short while and give good results.

Finally: you can't get "Concert Hall sound" in a small room. The listener's brain will not hear a 80-foot tall hall while sitting in a 10-foot room. In a "monitoring" room which has very little of its own reverb, it almost works. In a small club or bedroom, you get the small-room sound followed by the big-room sound. It can be fun, but it isn't realistic, and your mind knows that.