History of Reverb and Echo in Audio Production Recording

History of Reverb and Echo in Audio Production Recording Natural occurring reverb goes further back than man on earth. Since before man, creatures and nature made sounds that created natural reverb and echo. But now in today’s age with men and the modern technology that they have created there are all sorts of ways to create reverb and echo. From big metal sheets to plug-ins in a DAW on a computer, engineers have found ways to incorporate and benefit from reverb and echo on a recorded audio track. But before skipping into today’s ways of recording reverb and echo let’s shed some light on what reverb and echo truly is and where it came from. Reverberation or as most people refer to it as reverb, refers to the way sound waves reflects of the surfaces around the sound source before it reaches the listeners ear.
Reverb is basically a series of multiple fast echoes merged together so fast that the human ear cannot separate the sound into a delayed distinct duplicate sound. When hearing exact duplicates of the sound is when it becomes echo. In the early days of radio, they would send the radio signal through a line miles and miles away and bring it back. An easy way to hear reverb is to enter an empty room and clap. Immediately after the clap the person would hear the decaying sound of the clap; that is reverb. Recording reverb in the early days was as simple as just backing up a microphone from your sound source to reach the right amount of reverb you were looking for. There was also tape echo where sound was recorded on one head and reproduces it with a different head. The space between the two determined the delay. There were also a few units that had several heads to give delays simultaneously. Engineers would also add feedback to a delay to generate repeated echoes. Les Paul took the tape machine and reinvented it in 1948 by adding another recording head. Another way to successfully produce echo was to use oil cans filled with oil called oil can echo. Wallace