Produce a Unique Reverb Sound

A low-quality reverb unit can make your instruments sound muddy and lifeless. On the other hand, high-quality reverb effects can definitely introduce a different dimension and make everything sound better. Read the following tutorial and learn how to produce a unique reverb sound!

Abbey Road Chambers by Waves Audio

The Abbey Road Chambers plugin recreates a defining part of the studios' legendary sonic signature – the echo chamber used by Abbey Road's pop engineers to create exciting reverbs, delays, and other unique spatial effects on countless classic recordings by the Beatles and beyond. Developed together with Abbey Road Studios, Waves' Abbey Road Chambers puts you at the controls of the Studio Two echo chamber, complete with the original valve Neumann KM53 microphones and Altec 605 speaker, as used on almost every pop recording done at Abbey Road during the '60s.

Let's Start Testing

I will guide you through the Abbey Road Chambers user interface in the following tutorial. Like always, I will show you a few practical examples. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have previously made a short sequence in Soundbridge: D.A.W., which contains almost all the elements that are essential for the whole mix. First, I will add a fresh Abbey Road Chambers instance to a guitar sequence. After that, I will insert it on a clap group. In the end, we will compare the difference between unprocessed and processed instruments as well as the whole mix. So, let us start!

Abbey Road Chambers by Waves Audio is truly a unique and complex effect. Besides reverb processing, it gives you an additional set of the original filters going into the chamber – E.M.I.'s RS106 hi/low pass filter and the EMI RS127 Presence E.Q. – to sculpt the perfect chamber sound further. Furthermore, there is a recreation of the famous S.T.E.E.D. setup (Send, Tape, Echo, and Delay). This system extends the chamber's natural sonic palette into new territories. It splits the signal and creates a feedback loop from the studio's REDD console through a dedicated tape delay via RS106 and RS127 filters and then to the chamber and back.

The Interface

So, let's check out all aspects of the Abbey Road Chambers interface from top to bottom. In the top part of the interface, we can see a dedicated metering section as well as input and output controls. They have a retro look, just like on old Abbey Road Studio mixing consoles. The central part of the interface shows us the actual chamber presented from the top perspective of the room. The middle section is reserved for switching between chamber types. It offers 3 choices: Chamber 2, Mirror and Stone. The chamber 2 type provides more control than the other two, including microphone type, the position of the microphones in the chamber, and the type of speaker used in the chamber. Finally, you can control the position of the speaker. The bottom section is divided into 3 parts, the first of which is the S.T.E.E.D., which we mentioned above. Followed by the upper switching and controlling between the chamber types, we can say that this is the core of this awesome plugin.

Moreover, the S.T.E.E.D. section contains controls for Feedback, a Feedback filter, Drive, Modulation, and Delay Sync. On the left of that, we can see a "Filters to Chamber" section where we can control the gain and frequency. The last two parameters for control are the actual reverb amount and the Dry/Wet Mix.