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Episode 3 covers reverb and delves into its history and how it’s implemented using modern digital technology. The presenter gets to visit the famous reverb chambers in Capitol studios – and then a room that was designed and built to have no reverberation whatsoever. He also visits the disused underground oil storage tanks at Inchindown, Scotland which holds the record for having the longest reverberation time for a man-made structure¹.
The episode also features Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” which was cited in the featured article as an example of a gated reverb drum sound (I don’t think Ronson mentioned that this effect was created by combining reverb with a noise gate).
¹ https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/now-we-ve-heard-it-all-ac...
On the Fleetwod Mac song Dreams, they had two mics on the snare drum. One was on the top, the other was on the bottom, where the "snares" are (these are small metal chains that rattle, at least in my experience; other materials may be used?). The song only opens / turns on the lower mic during the chorus, making the drum slightly more present but also boxier. It's a really subtle technique to add movement to the changes and it blew my mind when I learned about it. Studio magic is a thing.
The 80s were a really interesting time in music. I feel like everything became even more formulaic due to MTV. Everything sort of converged in a way that was more pointed than before or since. Maybe that's just me due to when I grew up. After all, it also gave rise to hip hop and rap (I know, Motown came before that). That wasn't part of the monoculture.
kind of useless if the well produced vid delivers all the examples you can actually listen to ...
Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.
Also known as sidechaining.
My absolutely adored kind of sidechaining is spectral, that is, when it's not merely a loudness envelope of a source that drives the gain of a target, but when both are split into FFT bins and the envelope of each bin of the source drives the gain of the corresponding bin in the target.
That allows for carving out the target signal with the frequency response of the source, surgically. Works miracles is modern bass-heavy styles, along with spectral limiting.
There is one particularly amazing VST plugin at this, but I won't advertise here.
Thinking out load a bit here:
- maybe the existence of West-coast style "low pass gates" proves me wrong...
- gates sometimes have release controls, which would make them "automated volume control", but I still contend that aiming for zero gain when the gate closes makes them in/out controls not "dynamics" controls).
https://youtu.be/7Q2scPrc1WE?t=737
Counterintuitive thing I learned: when I tried to skip the explicit gate and 'let the model learn it', accuracy dropped meaningfully. The deterministic preprocessing wins over end-to-end here. Kind of an inverse of Padgham's 'accident becomes intent' — the technique survives, just on the analysis side now instead of the production side.
The Wikipedia article goes deeper into the history; the featured article has no mention of Steve Lillywhite and others who were using similar techniques before Hugh Padgham worked on Peter Gabriel’s third album. It also has a good explanation of the three different ways of creating this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_reverb
> 1981’s “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins is one of the most famous examples of a gated reverb drum sound.