Diki,
with all due respect but this is total nonsense. It may apply partly to the German market with their Schlager music, other than that it is incorrect. You and Abacus are correct though in the assessment of the arranger keyboard market which was and is essentially a home-use market and which first florished in countries with a strong organ tradition ( even related to church visits etc.) such as Holland, Germany, Belgium and the Mediterranean countries. But to the best of my knowledge there has never been any excessive love for REVERB in any of these countries and all manufacturers have continued to market their models with more often than not a default setting of 64 ( out of 128) for their reverbs. Perhaps it is the easiest way for them to take up a stand right in the middle ? I remember my first Roland E70 sounded like garbage out of the box.......

regards,
John

Sorry, but I hear what I hear.

Most arrangers with a default of 64 on the reverb, I find myself lowering it to 40 or so.

I go along with that definitely. On average I bring down reverb levels on drums to approx. 15-25 and bass even zero.
As to the acc. tracks I generally cut out the reverb ( or most of it) on pianos etc. whereas I am quite generous with strings and to some extent brass,trumpet, sax etc. This was how I started out when programming the PA80 way back in 2002 and only with those ( in itself minor) adjustments, folks would be pleasantly surprised as to what their keyboard was capable of.
Just imagine tweaking most other variables !!!!


regards,
John

Well, that pretty much confirms my description of 'drenched'!

If you listen to pop music from the 60's and 70's from Europe, and compare it to US stuff of roughly the same period, I think you'll hear that reverb is FAR more prominent. This may be why we tend to find ourselves turning it down so much. These things ARE voiced for their primary market... and it sure ain't us Americans!

I'm with you on this, Diki. As youngsters in the UK we could always tell a European record by the veil of reverb draped over everything - most unnatural. The odd thing was though, that when the Beeb recorded their 'live' bands for shows like Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan, draping reverb was standard practice. So it was backing tracks, lead vocal track, and harmony vocal track. Get that all down, five songs between 7 a.m. and noon with a tea break at 10:), then a wash with reverb, and it was done.

Doing session work around London in the sixties, bass was almost always recorded dry. With drums, producers usually wanted the snare heads tuned so loose they were almost like the skin of a rice pudding, a tuning no drummer would dream of on a live gig.

Hi Diki,

What you are saying now.... that I have American taste ???!!!

John

Just finished setting up a few reg banks for St. Pattys day songs on the S950....let me tell you many of the sounds are drenched in Too Much reverb, even teh ones that were transferred from the S910 I had to go in there and really do some FX surgery on many of the sounds and OTS setups......
not hard to do, but seems a bit much for default settings.
All done for now...