The short answer
Reverb is your sound arriving again, over and over, after bouncing off whatever is around you. Change what it bounces off and you change two things a listener hears immediately: how long the bouncing lasts, and how quickly the echoes become too many to count.
The names on your reverb are the four things people actually used. A room and a hall are places you have stood in. A plate is a sheet of steel, and a spring is a coil of wire, both of which were shaken with a voice on purpose because they were cheaper than a hall.
What each name is
- Room. A small space like the one you are sitting in. The bounces come back quickly from walls a few paces away and are gone in roughly half a second, so your voice still sounds close. This is the setting that makes a voice sound like it is somewhere rather than nowhere.
- Hall. A concert hall. The first bounces take longer to arrive because the walls are far away, and the tail runs about two seconds. Your voice sounds large, and it sounds further from the listener.
- Plate. A large sheet of steel hung in a frame, shaken by your voice through a driver, with pickups listening to the ring. A thin metal sheet rings the instant you shake it, so a plate has no build-up and arrives dense and bright. That is why it sat on so many classic vocals.
- Spring. Real metal springs shaken the same way. A spring passes the shake along slowly and unevenly, so each echo comes back with the boing you hear when you flick a spring by hand. It is the most obviously an effect of the four.
Why the plate sounds different from the hall
In a hall, the first thing you hear after your own voice is a handful of distinct reflections off the nearest surfaces, and only after those does the sound become a wash. That gap is a size cue: your ear reads the delay before the wash as the distance to the walls.
A steel plate has no far wall. The wave crosses it in a fraction of the time and comes back from every edge at once, so the dense part starts immediately and there is no gap to read. The result sounds big without sounding far away, which is exactly what a vocal usually wants: present, and still in a space.
Which one to reach for
For talking rather than music, the two useful settings are the two least dramatic ones. A little Room keeps you sounding close and stops a dry mic sounding like a voicemail. A little Plate gives the polished vocal sound without pushing you back from the mic.
Hall and Spring are the ones people notice. Save them for when the effect is the point: a character voice, a transition, a joke. On a stream or a call they put you at the far end of a building, which is the opposite of what you want while talking to someone.
Whatever you pick, reverb belongs late in the chain. Putting it before a gate or a compressor means those effects spend their time reacting to your echoes rather than to you, which is covered in effect chain order.
The five spaces in Patchd
The Reverb node in Patchd carries Room, Hall, Plate, Spring and a fifth called Shimmer, which adds an octave-up sparkle around the tail. One selector moves between them, with Size and Damping on top to make each one longer, shorter, brighter or darker.
One honest note about which is which. Our Plate and Spring are tuned by length and damping rather than built from a model of the metal, so they give you a shorter and a longer tail with their own character rather than a reproduction of a real plate or a real spring tank. The names tell you what they are for, and this page tells you what the originals sounded like so you can hear the difference when you meet one.
The takeaway
Room is a small space and dies in about half a second. Hall is a large one with a tail around two seconds and a gap before the wash that reads as distance. Plate is a sheet of steel, dense and bright from the first instant, which is why it flatters voices. Spring is a coil of wire, and every echo arrives with a boing. Reach for Room or Plate while you are talking, and keep Hall and Spring for when you want the effect heard.
Patchd is a Windows audio mixer with a full effects rack on every channel, and the Reverb node with its five spaces is in the Studio voice-fx rack. It is in open beta now, and if you clear the terms your invitation arrives straight away. The Studio tier is $5.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $119.99 once for a lifetime license, and the real-time engine is identical on both tiers.