squarepusher Alternative Delay/Reverb methods

[Cryptowen]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of reverb & delay vsts. They sound sweet. But sometimes it's fun to try something new, y'know? So I thought it might be interesting to have a thread about less common ways of producing effects of an echoy nature (preferably ways that don't involve using a room-sized ten thousand dollar contraption from 1937 that belongs to Squarepusher or something).

 

A few methods I've tried or plan on trying:

 

-dollar store echo mics spliced together (cheap spring reverb)

-doing a room recording of something, then doing a room recording of that, repeating until you have a weird droney mess)

-floppy drive reverb (no idea how that works but I've got a few old drives lying around & I want to find out)

-tape delay (I have a huge reel-to-reel machine I got for free from a recording studio. I just need to buy some tape for it)

[Guest Wall Bird]

You can do a ping pong delay in Logic by sending your audio through a series of busses that each delay the audio by slight and varied amounts and then routing them into each other. I guess that might actually be considered a multi-tap delay.

 

Re-amping the audio to resonate a body is fun. My friend did it with a 3' gong. He placed a speaker a few inches away from the gong and played the audio file to be effected at a low, low, volume and used a stereo pair of condensers to pick up the gong being excited by the playback. There are plenty of variations on this, such as re-amping your signal through various tubes and resonant bodies.

[Guest analogue wings]

microphone

 

speaker

 

pringles tube

[Guest hahathhat]

squarepusher did a non-$10k reverb. the cover of music is rotted has what looks to be a home-made plate reverb on it. these are not expensive to make!! need a nice slab of metal, a dampened mount, a speaker, and a (contact?) mic.

 

my shower also makes fantastic echoy noises. i always sing loudly when i'm taking a dump to help move the process along, and it's like, "damn, i really got to get some mics up here" but it's at the farthest corner of the house from the studio and i've been too lazy to drag all my shit up there for a sesh thus far

[Guest hahathhat]

there is a spot in the hallway upstairs with the weirdest fucking echo situation. if you stand in precisely the right spot and clap, you get a short delay with a good deal of feedback. best i can tell the sound gets trapped in that little spot and bounces around. yet another thing i must try and mic up.... but i feel it'd be hard to get everything in the right place; it's such a small little sweet spot....

 

(clapping, in general, is a good reverb/echo gauge. not a starter pistol, but it'll do)

[Squee]

Create your own IRs

[cear]

squarepusher did a non-$10k reverb. the cover of music is rotted has what looks to be a home-made plate reverb on it. these are not expensive to make!! need a nice slab of metal, a dampened mount, a speaker, and a (contact?) mic.

 

my shower also makes fantastic echoy noises. i always sing loudly when i'm taking a dump to help move the process along, and it's like, "damn, i really got to get some mics up here" but it's at the farthest corner of the house from the studio and i've been too lazy to drag all my shit up there for a sesh thus far

 

did you just say you take dumps in your shower?

[Cryptowen]

We can be honest here, we're electronic musicians.

[ZoeB]

Pfft, you kids and your tailor-made delay units! When I was your age, if you wanted a delay, you had to play the sample lots of times, only slightly quieter each time. It'd sound exactly the same rather than having pleasant, subtle degradation, and it'd use up the whole channel so you couldn't play any more notes at the same time.

[modey]

Pfft, you kids and your tailor-made delay units! When I was your age, if you wanted a delay, you had to play the sample lots of times, only slightly quieter each time. It'd sound exactly the same rather than having pleasant, subtle degradation, and it'd use up the whole channel so you couldn't play any more notes at the same time.

i used to do this in fasttracker, except it used up to 4 channels, depending on how much feedback you wanted, or how long the delayed sample was..

[ZoeB]

i used to do this in fasttracker, except it used up to 4 channels, depending on how much feedback you wanted, or how long the delayed sample was..

 

Good point! I was thinking of samples that were less than sixteenth notes long...

[TechDiff]

yeah, that's a classic! I remember doing this years back and thinking how amazingly realistic it sounded :)

 

Got some cool spinds before by running a granular multisample sampler through reverb, triggering the sampler and going wild on the verb size ammount, get that kinda pitchshifting effect. playing with other parameters on conjuction makes interesting results.

 

another good one is routing your reverb out to 2 separate mono channels instead of one stereo channel. that way youve given yourself a separate EQ etc for each side, can get cool stereo effects.

 

if you've got a nicely crap reverb plugin, you can usually get some great results turning the diffusion all the way down. Got some really cool kick sounds for hard industrial/techno stuff by sending a heavy kick through the reverb, diffusion at minimum, and pre delay set to half a beat. Run through some distortion and compression you can get some really gritty textural stuff.

 

example:

 

kick is a pretty clean synth patch from reaktor, with some high end PWM on top, couple samples from hitting a pair of crowbars together, and an 808 clap. Cheep FL reverb, Guitar rig, waves C1 and L2. There isn't a whole lot of distortion dialed in, most of the nastiness is from the reverb :)

[soundwave]

I like delays you can tweak without it glitching or stepping out like on the monomachine

 

sequence it in realtime and the fun begins

[ZoeB]

kick is a pretty clean synth patch from reaktor, with some high end PWM on top, couple samples from hitting a pair of crowbars together, and an 808 clap. Cheep FL reverb, Guitar rig, waves C1 and L2. There isn't a whole lot of distortion dialed in, most of the nastiness is from the reverb :)

 

That's a really neat and useful example, thanks! It sounds really good, and I wouldn't have guessed what it was. It's also nice to know I'm not the only one sampling various metal objects and the like. :D

[Boxus]

i could really use some new reverb techniques. had a nice old spring reverb in the studio at college but i was lazy and never really took advantage of it. now that i'm getting more into dub music i really wish i had fucked around with it a bit!

[Guest Sprigg]

The house a friend of mine lives in has a stairway/hall with some crazy acoustics. It's almost as if it acts as a reverb, high-feedback delay and hi-pass filter at the same time... Gotta get my crap over there and record some shit sometime.

[Braintree]

You can do a ping pong delay in Logic by sending your audio through a series of busses that each delay the audio by slight and varied amounts and then routing them into each other. I guess that might actually be considered a multi-tap delay.

 

That method also gives it a great tape-delay kind of degradation.

[Salvatorin]

relevant