These devices can help you create studio-quality tracks on the fly—anywhere.
They’re small, but create WAV-file, studio-quality sounds. I’m talking about portable field recorders—a valuable and affordable tool for location recordings, live music, podcasts, and videographers and filmmakers. They come in a wide range of prices and offer a variety of functions, like interchangeable microphone capsules, multi-tracking, and USB interface capability. Plus, the noise issues associated with earlier iterations of these recorders is nonexistent. Here’s five, in the $199 to $499 price range, worth investigating. And note that Sony, Tascam, and Zoom have more models at lower and higher pricing.
Zoom H8 8-Input Handy Recorder
This feature-packed recorder has 12 tracks, can be used as a USB interface, and records 24-bit/96 kHz audio. The H8 has two XLR/TRS inputs and four XLR inputs, and four mic preamps with phantom power. It can be bus-powered, battery-powered (four AAs), or you can use a power adapter. Onboard is an XY mic attachment with interchangeable capsules—and these capsules sound fantastic. The software has three setups for operation: field, music, and podcast, and each is optimized for those types of recordings. Other features include an automatic backup record, a six-second pre-record function, a built-in compressor and limiter, a metronome, and a speaker for playback. Tracks are recorded to an SD card.
All that utility makes the Zoom H8 the most versatile recorder I’ve seen. Plus, I’ve had a lot of experience with Zoom recorders, in many different settings, and they are reliable and rugged. If this is at the top end of your budget, rest assured it’s worth it.
$399 street, zoomcorp.com
“A good rule of thumb for those of us recording music is to be sure you’re choosing a model with the inputs, microphone and power options, and channels that you need.”
Tascam Portacapture X6 6-Channel 32-bit Portable Audio Field Recorder
This is a great-sounding, high-quality recorder that’s extremely easy to use, with a quick learning curve. It has built-in stereo mics, two XLR inputs, and phantom power, records at 32-bit/96 kHz, and offers reverb. The Portacapture X6 can be bus-powered, and works as an interface with your DAW. It also sports a 2.4” color touchscreen. Although it’s rugged and well-built, the Portacapture X6 doesn’t have enough inputs for complex music recording. But it’s great at everything else field recorders do. And like all the recorders in this overview, it is solid and reliable, and should hold up for years.
$299 street, tascam.com/us
Sony PCM-D10 High-Resolution Digital Audio Recorder
Sony is known for making solid, reliable home and studio equipment, and the PCM-D10 is no exception. This recorder includes two internal microphones that can be adjusted to three different patterns, two XLR/TRS combo inputs, and 48V phantom power. Extras include Bluetooth capability and a digital limiter. You can’t go wrong with its dependability, build, and ease of use, but since the PCM-D10 has fewer features than some less expensive recorders, it’s pretty pricey.
$499 street, electronics.sony.com
Roland R-07 2-Channel Handheld Recorder
This pocket-sized 24-bit/96 kHz recorder is high-quality, with built-in stereo microphones, but by design has fewer channels and features than the other recorders here. However, it is also the least costly and would suffice for field recordings, environmental sounds, and maybe podcast material, or interviews. It has no XLR inputs, so for music it’s mostly practical for grabbing ideas and sketches.
$199 street, roland.com
Olympus OM System LS-P5 Linear PCM Recorder
The Olympus LS-P5 is manufactured by a company that’s made its bones in the camera/video/film world, so it’s no surprise that it’s targeted at that market. Features include three microphones, Bluetooth, and a low-cut filter. The Olympus has no XLR inputs, but it’s suitable for field recording or video production, and, depending on your methodology, podcasting.
$249 street, explore.omsystem.com
And that’s a miniscule sampling of the field recorders available. But a good rule of thumb for those of us recording music is to be sure you’re choosing a model with the inputs, microphone and power options, and channels that you need.
The entire world of ’verb—from traditional to extreme—really does lie at your fingertips. Here’s how to access it.
This article is for recording guitarists eager to make the most of reverb plug-ins. We’ll explore the various reverb types, decode the controls you’re likely to encounter, and conclude with some suggestions for cool and creative reverb effects.
This is not a buyer’s guide, though you’ll hear many different products. Our focus is common reverb plug-in parameters and how to use them. Nearly all modern DAWs come with good-sounding reverbs. You can also add superb third-party plug-ins. But there are also plenty of free and budget-priced reverbs—just google “free reverb plug-in.”
Reverb = delay. Reverb is merely a delay effect. Sounds traveling through air eventually encounter surfaces. Some sound bounces off these surfaces, producing a complex network of echoes, made even more complex when the initial reflections bounce off secondary surfaces.
The controls on reverb plug-ins define how the software mimics this process. Function names can be confusing, but remember, everything relates to acoustic phenomena that you already understand intuitively. For example:
- The space’s size. (The further a sound travels before hitting a surface, the slower the echoes arrive.)
- The hardness of the reflective surfaces. (The harder the material, the louder, brighter, and more plentiful the echoes.
- The relative angles of the reflective surfaces. (A square room sounds different than a round one, which sounds different than a trapezoidal one.)
- The presence of other objects. (Soft surfaces like carpets, cushions, and acoustic foam diminish the reverb, usually affecting some frequencies more than others.)
- The listener’s location. (The further an ear or microphone from the sound source, the more reverberation is perceived.)
Understanding Reverb Types
By definition, all reverb plug-ins are digital. Most are either algorithmic or convolution-based. Algorithmic reverbs employ delay, feedback, and filters to mimic sounds bouncing around in space. Convolution reverb (also called impulse response or IR reverb) creates “snapshots” of actual sonic spaces and audio devices. In convolution, developers amplify a test tone in the targeted space (or through a target piece of audio gear) and record the results. The software compares the new recording to the dry test tone, and then it applies corresponding adjustments to any audio, making it sound as if it was recorded in the modeled space or through the modeled gear. (That’s how the speaker simulations work in most amp modelers.) Algorithmic and convolution reverbs often perform the same tasks, just via different methods.
But when we make musical choices, we rarely think, “This should be algorithmic and that should be convolution.” We’re usually trying to evoke a particular sound: a place, an old analog device, a freaky sound not found in nature. So, let’s take a whirlwind tour of reverb history, with thoughts about obtaining those sounds via plug-ins.
A Haul-Ass Reverb History
Real spaces. Before the 20th century the only reverbs were actual acoustic environments: caves, castles, temples, tombs. It wasn’t till the 18th century that people began constructing spaces specifically for their sonic properties—the roots of the modern concert hall.
Convolution reverbs excel at conjuring specific places. Most IR reverbs include libraries of such sounds. Some evoke iconic spaces and famed studios. IRs can also mimic small spaces, like a closet or compact car.
Clip 1 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
In Clip 1, you hear the same acoustic guitar snippet through IRs captured inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, the isolation block at Alcatraz prison, Chartres cathedral, and the interior of a VW Beetle, all using Audio Ease’s Altiverb library. (For demo purposes, reverb is applied rather heavily in all audio examples.)
Echo chambers were the earliest form of artificial reverb, though they aren’t all that artificial. The chamber is usually a room with hard, reflective surfaces. A loudspeaker in the chamber amplifies dry recordings, and a distant microphone records the results. It’s still “real reverb,” only it can be added and controlled independently from the original recording. This process evolved during the 1930s and ’40s. The first popular recording to use the effect was 1947’s “Peg o’ My Heart” by the Harmonicats, produced by audio genius Bill Putnam.
PEG O' MY HEART ~ The Harmonicats (1947)
During a recent recording session at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound, I shot Video 1 in the famed Studio A echo chamber, thanks to house engineer George Janho. You’ve heard this very room countless times. The Doors and Van Halen made most of their records here. You also hear this reverb on “Whole Lotta Love,” the vocal tracks on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Prince’s 1999 and Purple Rain, and countless other famous recordings.
Sunset Sound Chamber
Echo chambers are well represented in most IR reverb libraries. Most algorithmic reverbs do chambers as well, replicating the general effect without modeling a particular space. You can even find plug-ins dedicated to a specific chamber, like Universal Audio’s Capitol Chambers, which models the Hollywood chamber famously used by Frank Sinatra.
Spring reverbs. These were the first truly artificial reverbs. They initially appeared in pre-WWII Hammond organs, and by 1960 or so they had migrated to guitar amps. Fender wasn’t the first company to make reverb-equipped amps, but their early-’60s reverb units still define the effect for many guitarists.
The reverb effect is produced by routing the dry signal through actual springs, with a microphone capturing the clangorous results and blending them with the original tone. Springs generally sound splashy, trashy, and lo-fi, often in glorious ways. It’s an anarchic sound, best captured in a plug-in via IRs. Most of the spring reverb sounds in guitar modelers are IR-based. Meanwhile, reverb stompboxes—usually algorithmic—mimic the sound with varying degrees of success.
Plate reverb appeared in the late 1950s, initially in the Elektromesstechnik EMT-140, which remains a sonic gold standard. Plate reverb works similarly to spring reverb, but a massive metal sheet replaces the springs. It’s generally a smooth, sensuous sound relative to a spring.
Clip 2 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
In Clip 2, you hear the same acoustic guitar snippet through impulse responses of a Fender spring reverb unit and a vintage EMT-140 plate.
There are countless plate clones among today’s reverb plug-ins. Some are convolutions based on analog gear. But algorithmic reverbs also excel at faux-plate sounds. In fact, one of the initial goals of early digital reverb was to replace cumbersome mechanical plates. Speaking of which.…
Digital reverb (the algorithmic kind) arrived in 1976 via the EMT-250, also from Elektromesstechnik. Lexicon and AMS produced popular rivals. They focused largely on mimicking rooms, chambers, and plates. Sound quality has improved over the decades thanks to increased processing power and clever programming.
Today you can get far “better” algorithmic reverb from plug-ins. But ironically, those primitive digital ’verbs are trendy again in pop production. You can find precise clones of retro-digital hardware in plug-in form.
Convolution reverb debuted at the end of the century, popularized by Sony’s DRE S777 unit. Convolution reverbs often have fewer controls than their algorithmic cousins because most of the process is baked into the impulse response.
Most convolution reverbs have similar sound quality. The free ones can sound as good as the pricy ones. Higher prices are often based on the size and quality of the included IR libraries. Google free reverb impulse responses for gratis goodies.
Recent wrinkles. There are always interesting new reverb developments. For example, Things — Texture from AudioThings and Silo from Unfiltered Audio are anarchic granular reverbs that loop and manipulate tiny slices of the reverb signal to create otherworldly effects ranging from the brutal to the beautiful.
Clip 3 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 3 includes several granular reverb examples.
Image 2: Zynaptiq’s innovative Adaptiverb generates reverb via pitch-tracking oscillators rather than delays and feedback loops.
Some newer reverbs employ artificial intelligence to modify the effect in real time based on the audio input. iZotope’s Neoverb automatically filters out frequencies that can muddy your mix or add unwanted artifacts. And Zynaptiq’s Adaptiverb generates reverb in a novel way: Instead of echoing the dry signal, it employs pitch-tracking oscillators that generate reverb tails based on the dry signal. It, too, excels at radical reverbs suitable for sound design.
Clip 4 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 4 demonstrates a few of its possibilities.
Common Reverb Plug-in Controls
The knob names on a reverb plug-in can get confusing, but remember that they control variables that you already understand intuitively. Also, not all controls are equally important. The most essential ones are the wet/dry balance and the reverb decay time (how long it continues to sound). By all means learn the subtler functions, but don’t be surprised if you use them only rarely.
Video 2 walks you through most of the controls you’re likely to encounter on an algorithmic reverb plug-in. I used ChromaVerb from Apple’s Logic Pro DAW for the demo, but you’ll encounter similar parameters on most algorithmic reverb plug-ins.
Digital Reverb Walkthrough
Creative Reverb Ideas
Spring things. The single reverb knob on vintage amps is simply a wet/dry blend control. Some spring reverbs add a dwell control to set the amount of reverb input. Higher settings mean louder, longer reverberation.
But in the digital realm, you can deploy old-fashioned spring reverb in newfangled ways. For example:
- Pan the dry signal and spring sound apart for a broad stereo effect. (Traditional spring reverb is strictly mono.)
- Add predelay, inserting space between the dry and wet signals. (If the plug-in has no predelay control, just add the effect to an effect bus with a 100 percent wet, no-feedback delay upstream.)
- Route a guitar signal to two different spring reverb sounds, panned apart.
- Assign the reverb to an effect send, add a compressor to the effect channel, and then sidechain the compressor to the dry guitar sound. That way, the reverb is ducked when the guitar is loud, but swells to full volume during quiet passages.
- Apply digital modulation to the wet signal for detuned or pulsating effects.
Clip 5 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 5 starts with a straightforward spring sound before demonstrating the above options in order.
Fender-style reverb is so ubiquitous that simply using less familiar spring sounds can be startling.
Clip 6 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 6 is a smorgasbord of relatively obscure spring sounds from AudioThing’s Springs and Amp Designer, Logic Pro’s amp modeler.
Finally, it can be exciting to use springs on tracks that don’t usually get processed that way. For example, spring reverb is often considered too quirky and lo-fi to use on acoustic guitar or vocals.
Clip 7 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
But Clip 7 shows how attractive springs can sound on voice and acoustic. (You hear the dry sounds first.)
Unclean plates. In contrast to a spring’s lo-fi clank, simulated plate reverb is smooth and warm. Even if your track already has spring reverb, you might apply some plate ’verb to integrate it into a mix.
One creative avenue is deploying smooth plate reverb in relatively lo-fi ways. For example:
- Try placing the reverb before an amp modeler on a track to mimic a reverb stompbox. That way, the reverb is colored by both amp and speaker.
- Imagine a guitar amp with a huge metal plate inside instead of springs. If your amp modeler lets you use pure amp sounds without speaker modeling and vice-versa, try sandwiching a plate sound between two instances of amp modeler on the same track. Turn off the speaker sound on the first amp sim and use only the speaker sound on the second one. This way, only the speaker colors the reverb.
- Plate reverb also sounds great panned separately from the dry sound.
Clip 8 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 8 starts with a conventional plate sound before demoing the above ideas.
Liquid reverb. Reverb plug-ins have one big advantage over hardware: Everything can be automated within your DAW.
Automated Reverb
In Video 3 I’ve written automation for both the decay time and reverb damping for an evolving effect that would have been difficult on hardware.
Oh, the places you’ll go. Convolution reverbs usually have fewer controls than their algorithmic cousins. You might do no more than adjust the wet/dry or fine-tune the decay time. But IR reverbs don’t have to be “plug and play”—especially if you create your own reverbs. It’s a surprisingly simple process. (Some IR reverbs, like Altiverb and Logic Pro’s Space Designer, come with an app to generate the needed signals and process the recordings for use.)
Image 3: You can get cool, if unpredictable, results by dropping random audio files into an impulse response reverb like Logic Pro’s Space Designer.
Theoretically, you need a hi-fi PA system to amplify the needed tones in the target space, and good microphones to capture the results. But not always! I’ve captured cool IRs in my travels with nothing more than an iPhone and a spring-loaded clipboard in lieu of the traditional starter pistol. I’ve even obtained decent results by clacking a couple of stones together.
Clip 9 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 9 includes quick and dirty IRs that I captured in a Neolithic cave painting site in France, a thousand-year-old ancient Anasazi ball court in Arizona, an ancient Greek stone quarry, a 19th-century limestone kiln in Death Valley, and the inside of an acoustic guitar.
You can also get interesting, if unpredictable, results loading random audio files into the IR reverb.
Clip 10 — A Guitarist’s Guide to Reverb Plug-ins by premierguitar
Clip 10 features a dry guitar snippet, followed by bizarre reverb effects generated by drum loops, synth tones, and noises.
New sounds, new spaces. Using reverb plug-ins can be incredibly simple. Often it’s just a matter of scrolling through factory presets, or making basic balance and decay time adjustments. You can also use them in endlessly creative ways. Whatever your goals, I hope this article helps you find exactly the sounds you seek.
UA enters the entry-level interface fray with a stylish unit that includes a track-transforming compressor and preamp.
Beautiful design. Fun to use. The 76 compressor is a true tone sweetener. Elevates quality of raw tracks without burdening host computer processor or involving extra effects.
More expensive than roughly equivalent competition.
$299
Universal Audio Volt 276
uaudio.com
Generally speaking, audio interfaces are tools we prefer not to think about too much. Even powerful interfaces like Universal Audio’s Apollo Twin are made as streamlined as possible, so you can focus on the tracking, editing, and mixing that goes on inside your DAW.
To date, Universal Audio has largely steered clear of the lower-priced side of the interface spectrum, focusing instead on the more professional-grade end of the production equation and leaving the entry-level business to companies like Focusrite, PreSonus and others. UA’s Volt series of interfaces, which range from the $139 1-in/2-out Volt 1 to the $369 4-in/4-out Volt 476 mark a change in that strategy
Entry level interfaces can be pretty similar, but UA’s Volt series are not just lookalike/soundalike equivalents of entry-level rivals. And three of the models in the Volt range, including the Volt 276, reviewed here, are distinguished by the inclusion of a UA 1176-inspired compressor emulation. The compressor on the Volt is not one of the superb 1176 emulations available as UAD plugins. Volt does not have the DSP processing chip required to run them (nor is there a direct path from Volt to upgrade to the company’s superb Apollo and Luna operating environments). But Volt’s onboard 1176-inspired comp is nonetheless an effective tone sweetener that, along with the onboard UA 610-inspired preamp, make the Volt an extra-appealing entry-level interface option.
Pretty and Potent
A significant part of the mid-century design ethos was making beautiful, functional things available to consumers on a budget. It would be hard to find a piece of audio hardware that better embodies that thinking than the Volt 276. The wood and metal enclosure looks handsome and timeless on a desk and avoids the anonymous-to-ugly tech-minimalist look that is the prevailing design vernacular for this product category.
Controls are a streamlined affair: two TRS/XLR inputs, a phantom power button, buttons for each input to toggle between mic line and Hi-Z impedance, input gain knobs for each input, and monitor- and headphone-level knobs. UA also thoughtfully included MIDI-in and out jacks on the back. The important Volt-specific additions are the two buttons that activate the “vintage” preamp setting and the unit’s “76” compressor. The preamp is set and has no EQ capabilities, while the compressor lacks controls for altering attack, release, or gain, but has three presets for voice, guitar, and a fast attack setting. Their preset voices are very nice and very adaptive, all the same.
Lending a Hand in Garage Land
In its most basic application, the Volt is built to translate your input signal cleanly and with a minimum of latency to your DAW. And if you leave the vintage preamp and 76 comp out of the equation, the Volt performs that function well. There is little-to-no discernible extra noise and the basic preamp in the Volt massages the input from an electric guitar effectively. But the vintage preamp and 76 comp can change the sound of your input signal significantly. And it’s interesting to hear how they alter a signal in situations where an entry-level user/guitarist is most likely to use them.
One such application is recording an electric guitar to a simple DAW, like GarageBand or Ableton Live (the latter is included for free, along with Marshall and Ampeg amp emulation software). While DAW amp models have come a long way, they can still sound pretty thin, antiseptic, one-dimensional, and plagued by digital artifacts in spare mixes. But the 76 compressor and vintage pre both discernibly flatter GarageBand’s native guitar simulations, including some of the toughest to tame, like Fender tweed-inspired virtual amps.
The vintage pre and 76 are especially effective and go a long way toward making DAW-native models a lot more convincing in a mix.
The differences are often subtle, as you can hear in Clip 1. Switching on the vintage pre voice provides a very nice fattening agent—adding a darkish, warm, low-end coloration that’s not glaringly obvious, but makes models sound much more cohesive. The 76, meanwhile, makes treble notes more present, warmer, and rounder, which blunts the edge of many digital artifacts and adds a lot of the glued-together tonalities you hear from its more sophisticated cousins in the Apollo sphere. Together, though, the vintage pre and 76 are especially effective and go a long way toward making DAW-native models much more convincing in a mix. In fact, I would consider many of the sounds I created with this combination totally satisfactory for final mixes in certain song contexts and dense mixes.
There are some limits to this formula. High-gain fuzz on the front end, for instance, can still induce digital harshness if you’re not careful with the input gain. And there are no compressor adjustments or EQ functionality in the vintage pre to alter the signal as you might with analog gear or a more flexible plug-in. That said, the Volt’s ability to add body and soften the harsh elements in these models without a pedal or plug-in—just a guitar line into the interface—is a lovely thing, particularly if you’re creating with a bare-bones rig in a compact space or on the road.
Not surprisingly, the Volt shines more brightly when used with a miked electric guitar signal. As you hear in Clip 2, the effect of the vintage preamp setting is subtle—adding a touch more low- and low-mid resonance and a toasty glow compared to the segment using the Volt’s standard onboard preamp. But, here again, it’s the vintage preamp and 76 together that really shine. The Volt’s preamp and compressor may lack the flexibility, fidelity, and sculpting power of the UAD plug-ins and the original hardware that inspired them, but when used together they add a perceptible serving of the warm old-school effects you would hear from those more expensive solutions. And the inspiration and confidence those sounds can lend in the process of creation and tracking is no small thing.
The Verdict
We don’t often review interfaces. But given how impressed we’ve been with UA’s Apollo and UAD plug-ins in our own recording projects—and the company’s tendency to consistently bring something new to the table—it was hard to resist investigating how the Volt’s tools could empower recording guitarists in the entry-level sphere.
There’s no doubt that UA’s keen knack for design, both in the practical and purely aesthetic sense, pays big dividends. The Volt looks handsome, and the layout is smart and intuitive. In most basic, functional respects, it is every bit as good or better than rival interfaces. It’s super quiet and easy to set up. The big difference, apart from that very pretty deign, is the 76 compressor, but more crucially how the 76 and the vintage preamp voice work together. You may not want to use them on everything you track: The coloration can be strong when used in tandem. But for budget-constrained, entry-level users, the way it can spruce up a very basic guitar track without having to bog down a DAW and its host computer’s processor—as well as the pleasure and ease with which you can use them—make the 276 worth the extra money you’ll pay compared to the competition.