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Re: reverb just on the delays

On 21 jul 2006, at 20.00, rune fagereng wrote:

> On some of Jon Hassells tunes, his trompetsound has a near and  
> close direct sound, and just a small amout of his sound (lets say   
> 20%) has a big reverb, I think. The part that has reverb, also has  
> some delay, I think. But there are no delay on the direct sound, I  
> think....
>
> I play guitar, with the use of TC 2290 for delay, and a Alesis for  
> reverb. The Alesis is in the fx-chain of the Tc.
>
> Any Thoughts of how to get "closer" to the Hassells sound, in the  
> manner of getting reverb just on the delays ? Or any tips what so  
> ever ?


Hi Rune,

This post may not be relevant for your recent setup but I think it's  
a good tip, so I'm posting it anyway. I found out about it when using  
Ableton Live as the mixer for my EDP, other hardware machines and  
some software looping plug-ins. The point is that if you simply send  
part of your signal to a huge reverb (or delay, or both) it may  
quickly smear out the music so it becomes lame. The trick is to  
punctuate the reverb (in the effect loop) with short time segments of  
the audio that is going constantly. Then the listener can follow that  
note flying away towards the horizon on those beautiful clouds of  
reverb. Hassel often uses a freeze reverb for that; i.e. a reverb  
that keeps the last input audio frozen until new audio is coming  
(pretty clear you can't feed such a reverb with a constant guitar  
mangling? ;-)

So, one of the important steps here is to find a way to open up the  
effect send for just a short time. On a physical mixer you can do  
that with mute buttons on the busses. You may also set up foot pedals  
to open and close. But the method I like to use with Live is to  
create an empty "dummy" clip (audio or midi loop with no content) and  
then draw some suitable "Clip Envelopes" for the Effect Send Knog on  
that loop. This way you can many (alternative) loops of different  
lengths that only spin for the purpose of opening up the Effect Send  
on short 16th note (or whatever) durations every now and then. When  
working with Live there is a very good Freeze Verb preset coming with  
the built-in reverb (my overall fav verb. IMHO much cooler than any  
impulse response reverb).

First I thought this tip was too off topic, because you do not use  
Live, but then I ran into an interview with Jeff Rona where he speaks  
about this same technique with Live. And Rona has been working with  
Hassel so he's definitely into that vibe. Here's the article:
http://www.ableton.com/pages/artists/jeff_rona

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)
http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast)
http://www.myspace.com/looproom