Echo

Echo effects are pretty much essential in any genre of modern electro music. You can say it is one of the easiest ways to improve quality of  your sound.

There are 2 different effects, delay and reverb?? What the hell? Well it's because it's easier to have two seperate effects. You will often use them together to improve quality of your sound. Reverb will make a very natural effect that will make your sound echo like it's inside of some rom or space. You will have room size, diff (number of walls)  and damp settings. Echo is different in similar sized rooms, in more empty room it would decay slower. If you have decay, delay or damp knobs, fuck arround with them to make your reverb somewhat original. Delay effect is pretty much a repetition of the same sound every x seconds or every x steps with decaying volume. Unlike the reverb, it is possible to recreate delay in piano roll. Good general advice from Fruity Loops Studio manual:
"Reverb is one of those effects that is easy to overdo in a mix, creating a washed out and 'muddy' sound. Reverb works best on isolated or solo instruments. When your track gets busy and has a lot going on it is better to use some light delay on instruments. Rarely should you use reverb on the Master track and affect the whole mix, this tends to muddy the sound also."

It is advised to not apply reverb on drums. Apply less of it for drums and bass channels

People who are new to producing always use too much reverb once they discover it. Using high amounts of delay effect will make your melodies sound much different. using too much reverb will make your sound muddy.


Most generators or samplers will have built in reverb and delay settings. Some of them can only have like 2 knobs. I can tell you a little secret.. Those knobs are not there for you to modulate them. Buit in reverb makes built in preset sounds much higher quality than they would be without it. If you want to use those presets you would naturally turn off "built in reverb" and apply any effects outside of the plugin. You wouldn't like reverb applied on top of reverb, right? You want to keep things so that you can keep track of them and change in the way you like.

Reverb in Rob Papen Albino. Turn it off :