Wonderful land reverb

[fenderwim]

I am trying to get a sound close to that of wonderful land, especially the huge reverb it has.

At Abbey Road various trics where used to get the sound.

The following aspects played a roll in the reverb.

1 Hank doubled the track or part of the track. if you do this very precise it will not sound like chorus, but becomes much wider.
He was a master in that.

2 Bij means of a tape recorder a predelay of about 50ms was used with some modulation to avoid comb filtering, to send the combined sound to the Echo chamber.

3 Echo chamber 2 was used.

4 Furthermore Abbey road had EMT 140 plates, but I could not find if they where ever used for the shadows. I found that they where used for mastering.

Based on the data I collected, I can about create 1, 2 and 3 with plugins.
But with these three effects, I cannot get the huge reverb of wonderful land.
With the small size of the echo chamber this would not be possible anyway.

So they probably used the plates.

Anyone knows if this was the case?

Cheers

Wim

[Charlie Hall]

Hi Wim,
The Shadows At Abbey Road out take version does not have reverb added, nor the double track effect, and it still sounds fantastic. This proves that the most important part of the sound was Hank's sound combined with his Meazzi Echomatic 2. Therefore you should concentrate mostly on the guitar tone and the echo.
On hit versions the double track effect was not created by Hank. I am fairly certain that the double tracking was applied to the whole recording. I measured the timing of this double tracking at about 29.5ms.
I think a good sounding plate reverb with a boost at around 2KHz (also a bass rolloff around 300-500Hz and treble roll off at maybe 8-10KHz) and a predelay of 100ms should get close to the reverb sound, but don't add too much of the reverb.
Regards,
Charlie

[fenderwim]

Thanks Charlie

I will try these setting out.

Interestting that you could measure the double timing at 29.5 ms.
I will try this to. So it looks like, they did this with tape recorders.

Your suggestion of a predelay of about 100ms is quite good I think. I did already some further testing and also concluded that the predelay had to be increase from the 50ms I mentioned.

Sofar say 110-120ms gives about the best sound. I was still battleling with the reverb EQ and will try out your suggestion.

Also I concluded sofar that the reverb time should be between 5 and 6 sec.

Guitar tone and echo is indeed an other important aspect. Have made some progress already by upgrading my guitar.

Cheers

Wim

[Charlie Hall]

Hi Wim,
The reverb decay time is more likely to be around 3 seconds or maybe a little more. With predelay it sounds longer than that anyway. The decay time should really not be much longer than the time it takes for the echoes fade. At 360 ms it doesn't take very long for say 4 or 5 regenerations to occur but a sustained note at the end of a phrase will make the echo and any reverb seem much longer than that.
Decay time is defined by the amount of time the reverb signal drops to -60dB of the original level.
Regards,
Charlie

[fenderwim]

Hi Charlie

I found out that the reason I orginally concluded, that Wonderful land had a huge reverb, because I listened to the version from the Cd The Shadows hits from 1991.
Now I found the original version and indeed no reverb at all, but still sounds great.

I did not realize that the differance would be so big. However I like both sounds so I will try both versions.

For the doubling I tested the plugin Duet, which comes free with Computer Music. I used your suggested differance in ms.



I will back down on the reverb time as you suggested. My experience is also that one tends to overdo reverb.

I must say that the effect of Duet gave a big step in the right direction. Without reverb it is closer to the 1961 original.

Cheers

Wim