One of the earliest and most popular effects for cleaner styles is reverb. When Fender started making amps with a reverb unit built inside the amp case, we had the birth of surf music, and instrumental rock. This was a huge influence on guitars sounds for decades. and fueled the British Invasion bands that swept over the US and the rest of the world. Music that influences people to pick up the guitar today does not rely on this effect nearly as much as music of the past, and the ultra high gain amps of today rarely include it. Reverb remains the most popular effect that we take for granted. 

It Started by Talking in a Cave

Reverb is probably the oldest effect ever. People from 1000’s of years ago realized that talking in a cave sounded different than talking when surrounded by a forest. While the forest leaves and vines absorbed the sound of the voice, the cave added reflections of the voice scattering in all directions. If the cave was big, and someone was making noise at one end, it was difficult to hear exactly what was going on, as sound was reflecting off of every stalactite and stalagmite and made the sounds indistinct. The closer you were to the person talking, the more you heard the direct sound from that person’s mouth, which overpowered the reflections coming at you from every direction.

Compare this cave talking to yelling across a valley, which results in what we call echo. As the soundwaves travel from your head to the other side of the valley and back, we hear a fainter, more subdued echo of our voice coming back at us. These soundwaves traveled quite a long distance to come back to us, which is why they appear as distinct repeats. Reverb is really a combination of very short repeats reaching our ears at different times.

In guitar playing we add reverb to make us sound like we are playing in a bigger place that we actually are. Face it: a bedroom is a pretty uninspiring place to practice sometimes. In the era of Amps Before Distortion, BR (Before Rock), all of the cloth, from the folded clothes to the drapes to the Jetson’s bedspread,  absorbed the sound from the amp quickly. The result was a very dead sound, which was certainly uninspiring to write that next hit surf tune on. When Fender added reverb to their amps, it made the space young guitarists practice in sound much, much bigger. Notes trailed off longer, and it could sound like you were playing in a concert hall. While this idea seems quaint today, effects like reverb and tremolo were were new and exciting effects 60 years ago. While Fender amps certainly existed before then, the ones with reverb and tremolo are the ones responsible for ‘that Fender sound’ that the old timers at the guitar shop talk about.

Exit the Cave, Enter the Spring

Fender achieved this miracle of physics by using long springs in an enclosed pan at the bottom of the amp. The springs were pretty wobbly, and when signal was put through them, it added this metallic spronnngggg to every note. This system is still used in many amps, and you will know if your amp has a spring reverb if 1.  You have a reverb knob, and 2. If you kick the cabinet with the reverb on, you  hear the springs sound like you just tossed the amp down a flight of stairs. Classic guitar sounds, from rockabilly, to surf, to roots rock and Americana styles still employ spring reverb for the lo-fi sound it produces. It sounds like you are in a bigger space, but the notes don’t trail off as long. You get the depth without the decay, although some outboard spring reverb units, like the Fender at the top of this article, allow you you adjust that, too. The spring reverb in amps is a lot more basic. You usually get 1 knob. The higher the reverb level there is, the more washed out and indistinct your sound is (this might be your goal).

Plates and Racks

Studios used various ways to get reverb at the dawn of recording. Early studios used cavernous spaces with a speaker on one end and a microphone on the other to simulate bigger spaces. In the early 1960’s, plate reverbs became popular. These were giant sheets of metal within a frame that vibrated when a signal was applied to them. This vibration of the metal plate was recorded and mixed in with the direct signal. Of course the sound was overtly metallic, and EQ had to be added to soften the highs, but it worked. It didn’t require as much space as the earlier method of reverb, and it didn’t sound as springy as the spring reverb in amps at the time.

As music technology progressed, and it seemed that studios and eventually guitarists were gravitating towards rack units, some manufacturers were producing digital reverb units. With these, you could define the size of virtual space, where you were standing in it, and where the virtual microphone is in relationship to the vocalist or guitarist. Early digital units were very expensive and very advanced. They were ‘dumbed down’ for guitarists later, as we didn’t need the precise control that a studio unit might have. Like anything else, there were amazing sounding rack units, as well as bad sounding ones, and after the the rack era has come and gone, good ol’ amp reverb made its way to the top again as guitar music shifted away from the highly processed sounds of the 1980’s into the 1990’s.

Reverb Today

While heavier players don’t use reverb as much (and the amps they choose don’t come with it), reverb is still popular today among many guitarists. Technology has gotten much better- reverb pedals today can do things the rack boxes of the 1970’s and 1980’s could never do. I have abused rack reverbs for decades, and there is finally hardware (and software) that can make a guitar sound like anything from a old 1970’s string machine to a swarm of angry insects. Reverb is used today as much in replication of classic sounds to the creation of new ones, and it is making a comeback, although not quite always in the way Leo Fender intended. It seems the processing power in the average reverb pedal is more than it took to get men on the moon.

I love reverb on my regular guitar sounds, both clean or overdriven. I also like to abuse reverbs (either pedal, rack, or software) for ambient music. Do you use reverb at all? If you do, how do you prefer to get it?