- Hi, it's Matt!
Right, I thought I'd follow on from our videos
from the place with the world's longest reverb,
the Inchindown oil tanks.
With this I thought I'd talk a little bit about reverb,
and show how people can use it
(audio reverberating) to fake it to sound
like they're somewhere else.
Now we didn't fake those videos,
but I've got a thing from it
that means I can fake this one.
So firstly, reverb,
it's kind of like echo.
The difference is that an echo is when your brain
perceives it as discrete sounds,
so you'd hear "Hello!" (hello echoes)
(laughs) as lots of different hello's,
whereas reverb is more like one big thing
that goes on for longer than the original sound did.
So, going "Hello!" (hello reverberates)
would just sound like (deepens voice) "Hello!"
(uncertainly) Kind of?
Both echo and reverb come from
sound reflecting off hard surfaces.
So, every room has different amounts of hard surfaces,
so every room and every place
has a different reverb.
So you can tell the difference,
say when you're in a bathroom
to when you're in a living room,
because your bathroom's a small boxy room
with lots of hard surfaces,
and your living room's got
lots of soft furnishings in it, normally.
So that's what reverb sounds like naturally.
When you are recording things,
you sometimes want to add
fake, or generated reverb
to the thing you've recorded to make it sound nicer.
So, for example vocals in singing sound a lot better
when they're in a slightly more reverberating room.
Which is why churches and large halls
always sound so much better
for music than other places do.
There are many different types of reverb effects,
but the one I'm going to use today
is called convolution reverb.
And what it does, is it gets
the sound you've recorded somewhere else
and an impulse, which has been recorded
in the place you want it to sound like.
And then combines them together with maths,
so it sounds like the thing you recorded
was recorded in the place where the impulse was.
So for this to work, you need an impulse.
So on location, you record the impulse response
of the place you're in.
And to do that you record
a very loud instantaneous bang.
So we got that in the oil tank using a gunshot.
So, if I go on my computer,
you'll see this is what we've recorded.
This is a loud bang,
followed by the reverb of the room.
So you can see it getting quieter and quieter and quieter.
(loud gunshot reverberates)
And that goes on for a good minute or so.
Now, we can use that,
put it inside a convolution reverb,
it'll hear all of that echoing,
all of that reverberation,
and make the sound of my voice in this room
do that kind of thing.
So,
let's record me into here.
(recording) Hello, this is me at home!
I am not somewhere very echoey.
And let's hear what that sounds like normally.
(plays back recording) "Hello, this is me at home!
"I am not somewhere very echoey."
Well there we go, that sounds like I sound like.
So, let's add an effect.
We want reverb, and we want convolution reverb.
Now I've made a preset here,
and I can load in that bang sound--
So I've recorded me into this,
we've told it that we want to use a convolution reverb,
and we want to make it sound like
that bang sounded in that room.
I will apply it...
(melodiously) Da-da!
So we can see here its got a load of noise after it!
So let's give it a play.
(recording reverberates) "Hello, this is me at home!
"I am not somewhere very echoey."
(reverberation)
Can you hear that still going?
(reverberation)
Now, we can do that to anything.
We could put some music in there, we could--
If I had forgotten to say something,
when I was recording my video in there,
I could record it again later,
and then use this convolution reverb
to make it sound like I was there.
Which I didn't, you could see my lips moving
(laughs) in time.
I've made it so you can download our impulse responses,
which were recorded at the Inchindown oil tanks.
You can find the link in the description below.
If you've got any questions,
pop them in the comments below,
I'll see if I can answer them.
And if you haven't watched them,
go find our other videos from the Inchindown oil tanks.
Tom did one on the place itself,
and how the world-record was found there,
I did some musical experiments there,
and there's also a behind-the-scenes
on the Matt and Tom channel.
(cheerfully) Thank you! And, goodbye.
(to self) Hope that worked.