Make your own plate reverb II
Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2003 12:12 am
Hopelessly late post, maybe, but a plate reverb is easy(ish) to do. This post might be of use to someone, so here goes: <BR> <BR>First go to a scrap yard and get a big sheet of steel. The light stuff used off-stage at theatres for thunder is ok, though ideally you want it about 1.6 mm thick or more if it's really big, not 0.8 mm. You need to get it firmly mounted parallel to a brick wall. <BR> <BR>Then you need two wood rails, one above and one below the plate, with a narrow vertical plank bridging them, sliding along the plate like the things draughtsmen use for large scale drawing boards. On this will be a vinyl record pickup with a blob of glue dried over the needle. With some inventiveness you can lift that clear of the plate, and select the bit you want to pick up from by sliding the pickup head vertically on the sliding plank, and sliding the plank for horizontal axis. Once the position is right, hinge the head back so the pickup rests lightly against the plate. If you want stereo pickups, make a second sliding plank with another pickup. A third sliding plank holds a loudspeaker, maybe 2 to 10 watts depending on the size of the sheet to be driven. That speaker has a threaded bar of brass a few inches long, fitted to a disk made out of fibreglass PCB by nuts glued to prevent vibration undoing them, and the disk is glued to the cone rim, having been cut to fit well. The other end of the threaded bar is either fitted to the plate in the same way as to the disk, but it's better to use some kind of magnet. This lets you set the source on the plate as well as the pickup(s). This also could be made stereo, and would be well worth doing. <BR> <BR>Anyway, while there are lots of virtual reverb design software apps that will do this more easily if you just want a nice clean sound a bit like a plate, it's another thing entirely if you want a raw heavy overdriven twang with enough control to make it versatile, unique, whatever. <BR>This would be a tough bit of work, but for dub it would be unbeatable.