Reverse effects are perfect for adding a psychedelic texture or ethereal twist to your productions. We show you how…
The mid sixties saw artists wanting to expand their sonic vocabulary beyond the ordinary, often obliged by young engineers also with a desire to experiment. Up until this point, nobody had ever felt the need to turn the tape over and record in the wrong direction to reverse audio, but the weird, serpentine quality it leant to sounds was perfect for the aesthetic of the time.
The Sound
In the days of tape, the sound was achieved by turning the tape over (to reverse the direction), and overdubbing a part while listening to the (now reversed) pre-recorded tracks. Flipping the tape back reversed the overdub, and restored the other tracks to their forward direction.
This is now trivially simple in the DAW, but it still takes a bit of thought to get the best out of it, especially if you want the result to make musical sense. This can be a simple case of overdubbing a part in the usual way before separating and flipping each note individually. However for a truly authentic sound, the part needs to be played to a reversed track to inject some of the musical uncertainty that makes the tape way so much more fun to do and exotic to listen to.
New Soundscapes
The idea can be expanded upon to give the classic reverb effect on voices where the tail builds up ahead of the sound that created it for the ultimate horror sound design trick or to give a surreal twist to anything that needs it. Whatever you use it for, knowing how to work with reversed audio is a great trick to know- once you’ve tried it you might find more uses for it than you think.
Photo by Rene Asmussen from Pexels