Crafting Space with Reverb

Using My Daughter’s Room as an Acoustic Signature

There’s a certain magic in how a room sounds—and each one sounds different, with its own signature reverberation. When working on Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow, I found myself wondering: could I somehow preserve the sonic memory of my daughter’s room? Could that space, where we’d shared so many memories, become part of the album—not just in theme, but in sound itself?

What is a Reverb?

Not everyone may be familiar with what reverb is, or why it plays such a crucial role in music production. Reverb, short for reverberation, refers to the natural reflections of sound in a space. When a sound is made in a room, it doesn't just hit your ears directly—it also bounces off walls, ceilings, floors, and other surfaces, creating a complex wash of echoes that decay over time. This is what gives a space its unique acoustic character and why it's such a foundational element in music production.

Reverb is one of the most powerful tools we have to create a sense of space in music. It's what gives recordings their dimensionality—the difference between a sound feeling like it's right next to your ear or floating somewhere in the distance. In the simplest terms, the more reverb you apply to a sound, the further away it feels; the less reverb, the closer it appears. By adjusting these levels, we place each instrument or sound source into a kind of virtual room, constructing a layered, three-dimensional landscape.

Our brains are remarkably good at interpreting these spatial cues, even when we’re not consciously aware of them. As listeners, we instinctively begin to perceive depth in the music. Some instruments feel near, others seem to hover farther back, and together they form an immersive sonic environment.

In the early days of studio recording, engineers created reverb using echo chambers—actual rooms with reflective surfaces. A speaker would play the audio into the room, and microphones would capture the sound bouncing around, creating a natural reverberation that could then be mixed into the track.

Later, in the 1950s and 60s, plate reverb was introduced. This involved a large sheet of metal suspended on springs inside a wooden box. When sound was sent through a transducer connected to the plate, it would vibrate and create rich, smooth reflections. The vibrations were picked up by contact microphones. Plate reverbs were prized for their warm, lush sound and are still emulated in modern plugins.

Around the same time, spring reverbs became popular, especially in guitar amplifiers. Instead of a metal plate, they used springs to create the reverberation effect. Their sound is distinctive—metallic, and a bit chaotic—perfect for vintage guitars and dub music.

With the advent of digital technology in the 1980s, digital reverbs emerged. These were hardware units that used computer algorithms to simulate the reflections of a room or hall. Iconic models like the Lexicon 480L became studio staples, offering vast control over room size, decay, and diffusion. These digital units made it possible to place sounds in artificial spaces that didn’t physically exist—something previously impossible.

lexicon 480L — Digital Reverb (Image Source: MusicTech)

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, reverb moved into the software realm with the rise of plugins. These digital tools, running inside computer-based audio workstations, allowed unprecedented access to all types of reverb—algorithmic, convolution, vintage emulations, and experimental designs. Today, reverb plugins like Valhalla, LiquidSonics, and many others have reached an unprecedented level of realism and creative control.

In my previous album, Paradise Lost, I have extensively used Valhalla Vintage Verb —it imbued the music with a dreamy, nostalgic, almost otherworldly space. In fact, it was used so thoroughly that it gave the album a certain sonic character. For Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow, the goal was different. I wanted to use reverb not as an effect, but as a space—a glue to bind all the virtual instruments together as if they were performing in the same room. This shift from reverb as a stylistic tool to reverb as spatial realism became one of the album’s defining elements.

That’s when I started looking into Impulse Response (IR) reverbs—a world I haven't explored before. The technology behind it fascinated me: the ability to capture the sonic characteristics of real-world spaces and apply them to any sound. The moment I grasped the full potential of this technique, an idea struck me: Why not capture the IR of my daughter’s room?

What is an Impulse Response (IR) Reverb?

For those unfamiliar, Impulse Response (IR) reverbs work by recording the way a space reacts to a sound impulse—often a sharp transient like a clap or a sine sweep. This “fingerprint” is then used to recreate that space’s reverberation digitally. Unlike algorithmic reverbs, which simulate spaces through mathematical models, IR reverbs capture the unique acoustic imprint of real locations. This allows you to take the essence of a room—be it a grand concert hall, a small chapel, or, in my case, a child’s bedroom—and apply it to any sound, making it feel as though it was recorded inside that space.

The sine sweep method in particular is widely used due to its precision: a long, gradually rising sine wave played through speakers, captured by microphones, then deconvolved in software to produce the IR. To do this, I used Voxengo Deconvolver, a straightforward tool that includes both a test tone generator and a deconvolution engine. Once the sweep is recorded in the room, Voxengo Deconvolver processes the captured audio to isolate the impulse response. This resulting IR file can then be loaded into any convolution reverb plugin of your choice, such as Reverberate, for use in a music production environment. The process can be both technical and meditative—a strange combination of science and art.

Post-Pandemic Experimentation

The idea wasn’t just a technical experiment; it was deeply personal. The entire concept of Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow was shaped by bedtime stories, shared moments, and the imaginative worlds my daughter and I created together in that very room. Using its unique acoustics as a sonic signature felt like a way to immortalize that space—a quiet tribute embedded in the fabric of the album, even if listeners wouldn’t consciously perceive it.

These experiments took place in the post-pandemic period, a time when home experimentation was at its peak. The pandemic reshaped how people approached creativity. Filmmakers shot entire movies at home, people cooked elaborate dishes they had never dared attempt before, and musicians—like me—pushed the boundaries of what they could achieve within their own four walls. The DIY spirit was contagious, and suddenly, projects that once seemed daunting felt like exciting new frontiers. If there was ever a time to try something unconventional, this was it.

There was something quietly empowering about making music with whatever tools and space you had access to. In a time of global uncertainty, creativity became a form of stability—a small act of claiming activity over one's environment.

Capturing the Room

After some research, I landed on LiquidSonics Reverberate, a powerful convolution reverb plugin designed to work with custom IRs. Reverberate is renowned for its deep modulation capabilities and flexibility, allowing users to blend multiple IRs and tailor the reflections in detail. One of the unique aspects of Reverberate is its Fusion-IR technology, which adds dynamic modulation to traditional IRs, making the result feel more alive and musical.

Armed with my Yamaha studio monitors and a Rode microphone—the best I had at the time—I set out to capture the impulse response of my daughter’s room. The process wasn’t perfect, not by professional standards, but it was convincing enough. And more importantly, it was mine.

In addition to Reverberate, I also incorporated two other plugins by LiquidSonics: Cinematic Rooms and Seventh Heaven. Cinematic Rooms immediately struck me as one of the most realistic reverb plugins I had ever heard. It’s almost incomprehensible how far software reverbs have come in the past few decades—what once required expensive hardware and carefully designed spaces can now be recreated in the box with remarkable authenticity. Its stereo imaging and spatial definition are second to none, making it perfect for orchestral and cinematic passages.

Seventh Heaven, a faithful recreation of the legendary Bricasti M7 hardware reverb, brought its own lush and distinctive character. I found it especially compelling for synthesizers and other non-acoustic sound sources, where it added a beautiful depth and polish. The way it shapes tails and bloom feels more like a collaboration with the sound than an overlay.

Hearing sampled instruments placed inside that IR—sounding as if they were played within those familiar walls—was a strangely emotional experience. It was subtle, almost imperceptible to an untrained ear, but for me, it meant everything. The room, the memories, the stories—all captured in a spectral fingerprint, woven into the DNA of the album.

In reality, very few places exist without reverb. Even the smallest rooms have some kind of reflection or resonance. So when I captured the impulse response of my daughter’s room, I wasn’t aiming to create a dramatic reverb effect. In fact, the opposite is true: the reverb I use from that room is extremely subtle—so subtle that most listeners wouldn’t notice it. But it’s there. And in a way, that’s the point.

You could think of it like this: if an instrument on the album doesn’t seem to have reverb or reflections, it’s probably running through the IR of that very room. That gentle fingerprint, etched into the background, is part of what gives Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow its feeling of intimacy and atmosphere.

It’s easy to think of reverb as something grand—cathedrals, concert halls, or cavernous spaces. But in this case, it was about preserving something quiet, something close.

A Sonic Memento

Looking back, I’m grateful I took the time to explore IR reverbs and reconsider their role in my music—not just as tools for creating artificial spaces, but as mediums for infusing music with conceptual ideas.

It would have been easy to stick with my usual tools, but this detour led me somewhere unexpected and meaningful. Sometimes, the smallest details—the ones nobody else notices—carry the deepest significance. This album is full of such hidden layers, and this one, in particular, might be my favorite.

If there’s one thing I learned from this process, it’s that the places we live in carry sonic identities of their own—quiet, ghostlike imprints that stay with us, sometimes unnoticed. To find a way to integrate those sonic qualities into music feels like giving them a second life, nestled in the soundscape, forever.