60s Reverb Units At Abbey Road?

[VideoRacer]

Does anyone know what type of reverb units were used at Abbey road during the 60s? I was listening to some Beatles stuff the other day and started thinking about this.

 

I'll assume they were plates of some sort, but what types and what size plates? How were such units "set" in the audio chain? Were they just "full on" (a raw signal just fed through it) and just brought up as needed, or did they have their own control settings?

 

I'm trying to figure out how to emulate some of those reverb sounds using modern plugins, but I need some sort of reference. A lot of plugins today will have a "plate" setting, but of course there's no reference to any real-world counterpart.

 

Thanks for any info on this.

[Lee Flier]

Abbey Road has a live echo chamber. The Beatles got a lot of their early reverb sounds by sending to the chamber and feeding it back through the console, compressing it and then sending it to a second tape deck for delay.

 

At some point they got EMT plates, don't know exactly when that was but I believe I'll be at Abbey Road next month, so I can try to find out for ya. The thing about EMT plates is they all sound fairly different from one another, depending how they are tuned. So if I can glean anything about Abbey Road's specific plates, I shall. Actually there is already a line of "Abbey Road plugins" which were developed by one of their engineers, so you might want to do a search for those.

[VideoRacer]

Thanks, I'll look forward to that. So now to rethink this reverb thing. Live chamber, eh? I guess if the dimensions and surface properties are known, some reasonable facsimile can be conjured up with the right plugin.

[Lee Flier]

Funny thing you should mention Abbey Road's reverb, actually. The Beatles' use of the chamber (the whole business of feeding through the console and sending it to another tape deck for pre-delay and compressing the crap out of it - that was unprecedented at the time I believe. Those early records certainly had a sound that was unique for the time.

 

Well, I had a major spine-tingling moment when my band played at the Cavern Club two years ago... and not just for the obvious reasons. The acoustics in that room are great but a bit odd, because of the arched ceilings. The Beatles of course didn't have monitors at all, and now although they have wedges, they can't really turn up the wedges much because the sound bounces off the arches and feeds back pretty quickly. So for all intents and purposes, we had no monitors. Most of what we heard of our vocals was from the mains bouncing off the walls, which are brick so of course quite reflective.

 

Now, we do a lot of vocal harmonies, and during our first number there's a bit where the instruments stop and we hit an a capella vocal chord. And when we did that, I got this weird tingle down my spine. I didn't know exactly why, at the time, and just chalked it up to "cuz we're playing at the freakin CAVERN CLUB!" But by the 4th or 5th song, I'd figured it out: the reverb! It sounds like a friggin Beatles record!

 

I really think that the Beatles played in that room so many times that when they got into the studio, they wanted to emulate the sound they were hearing from the stage there - which was the sound of the main PA speakers bouncing off those walls and back to them. It sounds like massively compressed reverb with a load of pre-delay. And you can only hear it from the stage - if you're in the audience, you're hearing the mains directly so you don't notice the effect nearly so much. But on the stage, with no monitors - that's exactly what it sounds like.

 

A pretty crazy moment and realization, that.

[Lee Knight]

I really think that the Beatles played in that room so many times that when they got into the studio, they wanted to emulate the sound they were hearing from the stage there - which was the sound of the main PA speakers bouncing off those walls and back to them. It sounds like massively compressed reverb with a load of pre-delay. And you can only hear it from the stage - if you're in the audience, you're hearing the mains directly so you don't notice the effect nearly so much. But on the stage, with no monitors - that's exactly what it sounds like. A pretty crazy moment and realization, that.

 

 

That is so cool!

[Kendrix]

They may have had EMT plates at some point.

However, everything I've read about the beatles recordings and mixes stresses the impact that the tall room (studio #2) and that famous Abbey Road chamber had on the sound.

 

Then there are those Fairchild compressors....

[Mudcat007]

 

...Actually there is already a line of "Abbey Road plugins" which were developed by one of their engineers, so you might want to do a search for those.

 

 

For fun I looked this up >>> http://www.abbeyroadplugins.com

 

They currently only offer VSTs of the limiter and mastering pack that Abbey Road started using in 1969. I believe the originals are solid-state as the Abbey Road album was the only Beatles album recorded with a solid state signal path from end to end, as well as having been recorded completely on an 8-track deck.

 

It woud be nice if they could come up with a way to emulate the decay characteristics of studio 2 as well as the echo chamber. Seems like these could be modeled as a convolusion reverb.