This was a novelty and even when the novelty wore off there was hardly any other choice than to keep using them. The metallic and bouncy sound is what has fallen out of favor. Think of those spring door stops that cats and kids love to bend and let vibrate. They have that sound, which is noticeably lacking in higher frequencies, accentuating the low-end and middle frequencies. This coloration exudes a sense of warmth but can quickly build up to mud and a loss of clarity and focus in the mix.
This happens because higher frequency wavelengths don't have the energy to vibrate the coiled spring as well as lower frequency waves do. Besides the sound simply being less preferable to other reverbs, springs have some issues that are a part of the package and can't be avoided.
Guitarists know that if you bump into an amplifier with a spring in it, it can cause the amp to output a horrendously loud sound of thunder. Similar effects can occur when the springs are driven too hard, albeit at a much quieter amplitude.
There are a lot of purists who idolize the past for good reason and want to emulate the old days. For that reason analog spring reverb still exists as do VST plugins and digital algorithms in effects pedals and amps. They're still very relevant. You never know when you'll get a client that wants it in a mix.
The main thing to remember about springs are that they are synthetic. You should never reach for it when you want to emulate the sound of a realistic room.
In a live setting or in mixing with a dense instrumentation, spring verb should be thought of as an effect used to bring attention to moments in time and to add color rather than as a way to emulate the natural reverb of a realistic physical space. That means you don't want to crank that sucker up and keep it running the whole time. Keep it at lower volumes tucked underneath the instrument and general mix, bringing it up in volume during solos or special moments.
If you try to make it prominent in dense mixes it's going to make a mess of things. In more sparse arrangements it can be an "always on" effect but expect it to add a lot of bottom end to your sound.
Not only will you gain a bouncy, metallic sound but you'll boost the low end and low mids. If you can run it in an effects loop and add an equalizer after it, you can better shape it to play well with your mix.
You can achieve that same concept when mixing by using an auxiliary bus. Add a send to your track or tracks to push them over to the bus, where you've applied your spring reverb and also a parametric equalizer after it. Here you can shape the sound of the reverb to not only carve out room for your instruments but also to reduce the impact of the low-end boost, if desired.
The above is an example of how you'd deal with EQ on a reverb bus. A low roll-off and high roll-off are essential to maintaining clarity in the mix for all instruments, and then you can cut around the area of intelligibility and presence. The reverb tank should be isolated from vibrating surfaces as much as possible.
Avoid mounting the outer channel of the reverb tank directly to the mounting surface by using grommets, rubber standoffs, reverb tank bag and liner or other products designed for mechanical isolation. Avoid mounting on cabinet members that would tend to act as "sounding boards. Allow for slack in cables attached to the reverb tank to prevent forming mechanical feedback paths. External Magnetic Fields - Even though the transducers are shielded by the outer steel channel, the output transducer end in particular should be kept away from transformer fields.
The effectiveness of the shield varies with its orientation in an external magnetic field. In order to suit any grounding scheme, reverb tank connectors come in all combinations of input and output insulated and non-insulated phono jacks a. RCA jack. A non-insulated phono jack is one whose outer shell is grounded to the outer steel channel chassis of the reverb tank.
If the amplifier's connection to the reverb tank's phono jack shell is not at ground potential, it is important that the tank be chosen with an insulated connector at that connection point. If the amp's connection to the reverb tank's phono jack shell is at ground potential, either insulated or grounded connector may be used at that connection point. These schematics are examples of drive and recovery circuits from popular guitar amplifiers.
There are many varieties of tube and solid state drive and recovery circuits used in guitar amplification resulting in different input and output impedances. It is important to match the original tank input and output impedance as closely as possible in order for the reverb effect to work properly. Use an input high-pass filter to compensate for the input coil's inductive reactance. Drive the input coil as hard as possible without overdriving exceeding core saturation.
Avoid DC currents through the coil for maximum headroom before core saturation. In general, a current source is equivalent to a voltage source with a resistor in series.
In practice, the resistor should have a value greater than 5 times the 1kHz impedance of the input transducer. The output signal from the tank should be about 1 to 5 mV.
Sound is a form of energy that travels outward from a sound source. The vibrating particles also pass sound energy along as they collide with other particles.
As this occurs, the sound energy dissipates, gradually fading in volume until it loses all its energy. A sound wave is described as a longitudinal aka compression wave , so the particles of the affected medium will vibrate back and forth parallel to the direction the sound wave is propagating. In very loose terms, the direction a sound wave travels in is also the direction it vibrates in. Light waves are transverse and sound waves are longitudinal.
When describing audio reflections in a reverberant space, it is not the same as describing light reflections. You probably already know that the character of a sound wave will change depending on the medium it travels through. But the actual state of that medium is important as well. When moving through gases, sound energy at all frequencies will travel at the same speed.
In liquids, the particles are closer together than gas particles, so they can transmit energy from their vibrations quicker than gas particles can. This means:. In solids, particles are even closer together than liquid particles, being chemically bonded to each other. The different behaviours of sound in each state of matter are taken advantage of when making spring reverbs as we will see later. Eardrum movement causes the three ear bones incus, malleus, and stapes to vibrate.
These three bones push against the cochlea in the inner ear, displacing the basilar membrane. Its structure enables different frequencies of sound to determine which part of the basilar membrane vibrates, where tiny hair-like strands convert mechanical energy into neural energy which gets sent to the brain, where the information is interpreted as sound. Humans are binaural. This means that most of us have two ears.
You probably have never given it much thought, but the distance between our ears is actually very important for how we perceive sound. Our brain takes advantage of this distance to figure out where a sound source is coming from.
This is called localization. The precedence effect aka law of the first wavefront , or Haas effect , describes the phenomenon of sound source localization. Then an other idea emerged, a really simple one, but yet really efficient. We finally onset the heart of the subject! In this chapter, I will explain how to transfert your guitar signal into the springs and then, receive a delicious reverb effect in your ears.
The tank usually has 2 RCA connectors, the white one is for the input and the red one for the output. Input and output have different role that we will describe thereafter. At the input of the system, we want to transform an electric guitar signal to a mechanical disturbance propagated in the spring by creating a mechanic oscillation. In order to achieve this, we will use what is called a transducer.
It is on the electronic side a coil that captures and stores the electric guitar signal and on the mechanical side, a system that will disrupt the magnetic field so that the springs will begin to move. The electric guitar signal causes an electric field at the entrance of the coil, this signal is dynamic its level changes permanently depending on what you play, you are a disrupter of our system! And this lamination goes around the magnets to which the springs are attached.
This disturbance will create a magnetic field, oscillating with a waveform really close our electric field. This oscillating magnetic field will then provoque a movement of the magnet of the springs and then this is how your springs finally move according to your guitar playing. This is the same phenomena but on the opposite way! The springs oscillate to your guitar waveform and also has bounces thanks to rebounds on each side of the tank.
Then the magnetic field of the lamination is disturbed because of the oscillation of the magnetic and this will create an electric signal on the output coil. As the spring will diffuse the different waves, it will at the same time receive input disturbances from our transducer, while the output signal will bounce on its fasteners. The different signals will mix and create a very atypical sound.
Each system therefore has its own characteristics that depend on the materials used, the stiffness of the springs and their size. So the first element of our transducer is a coil and this is where we need to send our signal.
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