Premature Reverberation

The psychedelic era of music in the 60's led to many experimental production techniques, but perhaps none was use quite so much as playing taped performances in reverse, or mixing the forward signal with a backwards copy of itself.  As time marched on, these types of sounds evolved into high-glass reverse reverb effects often used in the club music of the 80's for dramatic special effects.  It's still quite a cool effect these days, used correctly.  So today, I'll show you how to start experimenting with this technique in your own music.

1.  Select a track you want to try the effect on... guitar leads and vocals are particularly well-suited for these types of effects.

2.  Make a copy of the audio you want the effect on and move it to a new track.  Use your DAW's audio editing features to reverse the audio of the second track.

3. Apply a medium-long reverb to the reversed track and bounce it, making sure to set the end point of your bounce so it doesn't cut off the reverb tail.

4. Import your bounce and replace your reversed audio track with it.  Use your DAW's audio editing features to reverse the track yet again.

5.  Now you can tweak the levels between the dry track and the reverse reverb track to set the desired wetness.  Don't be afraid to experiment with adding additional processing to each of these tracks, either.  You might create the next trendy variation of this effect.