Add Stunning Sense of Space With a Plate Reverb

Most professional music producers consider reverb an inevitable effect in modern music. Reverb enriches the audio signal by adding a sense of space, depth, and texture. It makes everything sound better. Modern times have given us various choices regarding reverb, from costly hardware units to cheap software plugins. Without any doubt, an iconical reverb effect that was used throughout the better part of the 20th century and has been a part of many famous records is the plate reverb created by EMI studios in the famous Abbey Road.  

Abbey Road Studios Plate Reverb 

Introduced in the 1950s, plate reverbs have been a fixture of recorded music ever since. Used most prominently in the '60s and '70s by pioneering bands, including the Beatles and Pink Floyd, Abbey Road Studios' original reverb plates were installed in 1957 to complement the fixed reverberation times of the studios' echo chambers. Later, Abbey Road's technical engineers tweaked these beautiful-sounding plates with a variable reverb time of up to six seconds to perfection. 

Additionally, to keep noise to a minimum, EMI's Central Research Laboratories designed unique hybrid solid-state drive amps for Plates A, B, and C. Moreover, Plate D was fully valve-powered on both drive and output stages, allowing various sonic characteristics, from warm and dark to lush and smooth. Recently, Waves Audio offered us an impressive digital emulation of the mentioned plate reverb called Abbey Road Plates.

In my opinion, this plugin unit is a faithful copy of the actual unit, and in the following tutorial, I will talk more about it. So, let's start by adding the Abbey Road Plates plugin on the newly made MIDI channel within Soundbridge.

The Interface

Upon opening the plugin interface, we can see that the graphic designer dedicated it to the looks of the original unit. Besides that, in the upper part, we can see the image of the plates in a room. Consequently, below this, there is a section with the controllable parameters. Furthermore, the left and right sides contain input and output parameters. The faders look like the ones on the original unit, which is a nice touch as well. Moreover, the middle of the interface contains a section for chaining the plate type, a damper section, built-in EQ, and classic parameters like pre-delay, DRY/Wet, drive, and analog noise. To conclude, I will show you how this particular reverb unit sounds on different instruments, so check out the examples.  

~Ac. Guitar without ABP

~Ac. Guitar with ABP

~Percussion loop without ABP

~Percussion loop with ABP

~Violin without ABP

~Violin with ABP