Reverb
- Types: room (small and natural), plate (bright and dense, classic on vocals), hall (large), chamber, spring (guitars, dub).
- Pre-delay: delay before the tail (20–80 ms). It keeps the voice in front and the tail behind; it can be synced to tempo.
- Decay: length of the tail (0.8–3 s); the faster or denser the song, the shorter it should be.
- Damping / EQ: filter the tail (HPF 200–400 Hz, LPF 6–10 kHz) to avoid mud and exaggerated sibilance.
- Early reflections: give the feeling of a room without the tail.
Delay
Formula: ms = 60000 / BPM for a quarter note.
- At 120 BPM: quarter note 500 ms, eighth note 250 ms, dotted eighth note 375 ms, sixteenth note 125 ms.
- Slapback: 80–120 ms, a single repeat (rockabilly, rap vocals).
- Ping-pong: repeats alternating L/R.
- Throw: delay turned on only for the last word of a phrase.
- Filter the repeats and use ducking (the delay lowers when the voice sings).
Sends and returns
Use reverbs and delays on sends to dedicated buses: several tracks share the same space and the mix sounds cohesive. Lightly compressing or sidechaining the return from the voice maintains clarity.
Example in A minor at 140 BPM (half-time)
Quarter note = 428.6 ms. Rap vocal with a 107 ms slapback (a sixteenth note), a dotted-eighth throw (321 ms) on the last words, a 1.2 s plate with 30 ms pre-delay filtered at 300 Hz and 8 kHz.
Real-world example
The slapback echo on Elvis Presley's voice in “Heartbreak Hotel” (1956) and the gated reverb on Phil Collins's drums in the 1980s are two historic signatures of the creative use of space.