Reverb or not!

Top 40 Radio in the 50’s and 60’s had little or no resemblance to what is on the airwaves these days. The difference was much more than the music; it was the entire experience. There were fast paced DJs who loved to “walk up a record and hit the post.” There were Pams and Pepper-Tanner jingles all over the place. And the coolest of the cool stations all had a reverb sound.

The ways they created that reverb differed greatly and the sounds they created were unique signatures for each.

One of the most iconic reverb sounds came out of that 50 thousand watt blowtorch, WABC in New York. WABC used a real room to create their reverb. They had a speaker on one wall and a microphone on the other. The output of the control room was split into two parts, the main part fed the transmitter directly and a small portion ran through the reverb room where the natural “wall bounce” was picked up by the microphone and mixed back with the main signal. This arrangement gave the station a bigger than life sound that made the audience feel that they were part of something really big.

That same “room reverb” arrangement was used in at least one of the big recording studios used by the Brill Building recording companies. You heard it in a number of your favorite tunes.

There was this one place on the dial that for a short while used a tape delay to create an echo. They ran the signal through a tape recorder running at 15 inches per second. Because those machines had separate record and play heads you could get a pretty cool echo effect that way. They built a tape loop that ran around a pair of spools that spun on the supply and take up reel posts. They had to have two of these set ups because there was a lot of wear and tear on the tape loops and they had to change them out once an hour, or more often if the tape loop broke. That station had operating engineers in the control rooms that could manage the extra workload that the echo created, but despite that, they abandoned the echo after a few months because it became too unwieldy and created too many “dead air” gaps in their signal with all the tape breaks.

Left: A two spring Gibbs Reverb Unit typically used in Hammond Organs. Courtesy Reverb.com. The station where I worked in the late ‘60s, WCOS AM/FM in Columbia SC used the most common method for creating reverb on our AM station; spring reverbs from organs. In our case it was a three spring reverb using made from a Hammond organ. Part of the signal was fed by a small transducer (that is a fancy word for parts of a speaker) attached to one end of the springs which were attached to another transducer (this time parts of a microphone) on the other end. One of the unique features of this “home brew” system build by our chief engineer was that in addition to the reverb it had a “chime” style door bell incorporated into it.

Attached to this Rube Goldberg contraption there was a long wire with a steel box containing two buttons. One of those buttons rang the doorbell so we could do our “chime time” announcements between records. The other was really cool. This is the way it worked. Normally two of the three springs were “in the circuit” producing a constant reverb. When pressed, that second button added a third spring to the reverb and significantly increased the reverb sound.

We used these two effects in the live newscasts quite a bit. At first between each story we would ring the bell and then announce the city of origin of the news story in high reverb. Eventually we dropped the chime and just went with the high reverb.

I must say that “high reverb” and new DJs more often than not didn’t mix well. I was guilty of this myself. When I first went on the air there, I got enamored with the effect for the first few months and was “high reverb-ing” almost everything I said. That is until our long suffering program director called me into his office and told me that if I pushed that button outside of the news any time in the next six months I would have been out of there. That broke me of that bad habit.

I found out from him later that he had to have “that conversation” with every new DJ when they first started doing shows. I know he had to get tired of that. There were a lot of DJs involved in a 24 hour station before automation came along. There was always some turn over, especially in the part time, weekend gang. So he had to repeat himself a lot. One of my favorite Top 40 abbreviations, “TTBB”, came from him. It means “Time, Temp, Boom - Boom” and gets to the heart of the fast paced style of radio broadcasting back in the day.

As old school Top 40 radio gave way to Album Oriented Rock and Mono AM passed the baton off to Stereo FM, reverb fell out of favor as a production element. So it is rarely heard on the dial today. Whenever I hear it on the dial it always catches my attention and drives my memory to the days when we played “The top of the pops and the cream of the crop, for all the cool cats and hot kitties.” That is not a bad thing. Oh MY!