 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and in this video today I'm going to be showing you four tips on how you can use reverb. Now reverb is an effect that creates a fake sense of space around your guitar tone. So everyone that's watching this video will have experienced natural reverb at some point in their life. Let's say you've gone into a big hall or even a cave and you've shouted something and you've heard the sound of your voice bouncing off the different parts of the space that you're in and coming back to you. That is natural reverb. Now when we play guitar our guitar sound is inherently dry so the guitar itself does not produce any reverb. So what we can do as guitar players is we can add reverb later on in the signal chain. We can do this either as an effect in our signal chain or as something we add later on let's say we're recording an album. We might want to add some reverb in post-production while mixing the album to give the instruments a sense of space. So we're creating a fake sense of space. Now with reverb there are loads of different types of reverb depending on what type of space we want to create some of which can be models of physical spaces like rooms or halls and then we also have other types of reverb like spring reverb that you often hear in vintage guitar amps or plate reverb that was really popular in the 1980s studio musician scene. So in this video I'm going to show you four of my favorite ways to use reverb. Now all the reverbs that we're going to be hearing are coming from the Blackstar Amp2 so everything you're hearing is coming from this unit. You can take these principles and port them into other Blackstar products as well but we're going to be using all three modes of the reverb that are built into the Amp2. So the gear I'm using in this video is my Chapman guitars ML3 traditional and that's plugged straight into the Amp2. Everything you're hearing is going to come from the Amp2 and that's going via the XLR output. I'm using cab rig and that's going straight into my audio interface. So the first method that I'm going to show you is using a room reverb to add some space to a clean tone. Now I've dialed in a really simple American clean tone. So the American voice that I've got dialed in is using the 6L6 response and the USA voice here. The gain is set to just about one o'clock but we're not really pushing any gain out here this is pretty much a clean sound. Got the bass just above midnight the mid is scooped back to about 10 o'clock and the treble is just a little lift up to about two o'clock and then obviously the master control you can set to taste depending on how loud you want to actually be. So my basic clean tone using those EQ settings sounds like this. So you can hear that is totally dry there's no reverb whatsoever even if I'm playing something quite choppy and funky it's very very immediate and it cuts off instantly. So I'm going to be using a room reverb I've got the time and level set straight up at 12 o'clock. I'm going to be using some slightly more extreme reverb settings in this video so you can hear what they're doing but in your own setup you might want to dial these back a little bit to blend in with your overall tone. So the room mode is going to add an emulation of a room. So what we're going to hear is not that dry direct guitar signal we're going to hear an emulation of a speaker inside a room and that's where we start to hear natural reverb because even in a room this size I have natural reverb even though it's not that audible because I've got acoustic treatment when I hear a speaker in this room I'm still hearing the sound bouncing off different walls and that is natural reverb. So this is going to add some space to my clean tone which is going to sound like this. Now you can hear that reverb tail off there at the end especially when I play something choppy we've got that tail that's the reverb if I play something funky it's going to sound less direct. So even just with that amount of reverb we can hear the space that it adds. The second thing I'm going to show you is how to use a spring reverb to add an amplifier-like reverb sound to a crunchy blues rock tone. So I've now got the drive turned on on the drive mode the drive knob is about 10 o'clock and I've got the level boosted to just under two o'clock so we're pushing the amp here with a low gain overdrive which sounds like this. So that's incredibly dry I'm going to use the spring reverb here to simulate a spring reverb tank in a tube amplifier. So I've got the time at about half where you can obviously adjust this to taste depending on how long you want your reverb tail to go on for and the level I've got to just over 10 o'clock because that's where we get a nice blend between the drive signal and the reverb signal. You can dial it back if you want it to be a bit more subtle and if you want more spring you can crank that level up a bit more. Here's how it sounds with the spring reverb. So that's quite reminiscent of old tube amps that have spring reverb tanks because we get that nice push from the drive but then that spongy kind of reverb that you get from a real spring. The third thing I'm going to show you is how to use a big spacious sounding plate reverb for a really full and lush sounding lead guitar tone. So I've now got the drive pushed a bit more so we're up at about four o'clock here we're nearly on full and I kept the level about the same because we just want to push the front of the amp with quite a lot of saturation. Now here's how my lead tone sounds completely dry. Now personally I love lead guitar tones that are absolutely soaked in reverb so I'm using the plate reverb here and you can see I've got the time and level set to about two o'clock. Now what this is going to do is this is going to give me a lot of space around those notes. Now for me personally I love 80s rock guitar tones and this is very reminiscent of an 80s style guitar solo tone because this is going to be very spacious and every note is going to sound quite big. It's going to sound like this with the reverb on. So you can see how that adds a ton of space to that lead tone. Now like I said I like those lead tones that are quite extreme with the reverb settings. If you are not as much of a fan of those big spacious lead tones as I am you could use the same principle but dial back the reverb slightly. And the final thing I'm going to show you is how to create a very ambient and kind of fake shimmer reverb sound using the Amped 2. So I've now gone back to my completely clean sound and I'm going to be playing a simple chord pattern and what I want to do is I want to create an ambient sound for this chord pattern. So the pattern I'm going to be playing is something like this. Now once again that's completely dry so on its own that has no real character or ambience of its own. Now I'm going to be using the plate reverb with everything frank so the time and the level are set to full and also going to be using the delay here in the shimmer setting. Now what I've done is I've got the time set quite low so maybe like just above 9 o'clock between 9 and 10 o'clock and the feedback just over halfway and the level on 2 o'clock. Now I'm blending this in so you can't really hear the delay as such. You can't hear this as a delay effect. What I'm doing is I'm tagging on the shimmer effect of the delay with a very very short repeat. So my repeats on the delay are just this. It's almost like a slapback delay but if you hold a note you get that shimmer tail but you don't get the delay like if I turn the time up I get more of the delay repeat there. What I want is just this even shorter than that like a slapback because it's that shimmer tail that I'm interested in. Now I'm going to turn on the plate reverb which if you hear that in isolation is like this. It goes on for quite a while. I'm going to combine the delay with that shimmer tail with the reverb and that's going to give me this. So that created a nice ambient almost pad-like effect so pairing the shimmer of the delay with a really short time repeat and a huge reverb sound gives me kind of a fake shimmer verb sound. So there you go there are four fun tips on how you guys can use reverb with your Blackstar Amped 2. Let me know down below in the comments how you've gotten on with these tips and how you are using the reverb in your Amped 2. In description there is a link that takes you over to the Blackstar website where there's a full write-up on this lesson and everything I've talked about. You can see that over there in an article form. Don't forget to subscribe to Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more free video lessons like this and there's a ton more content over on the Blackstar potential page which is linked down below as well. If you're looking for a music teacher in your local area you can check out musicteacher.com. They have a huge network of teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you guys soon.