Add Reverb to Audio

What does adding reverb to audio actually do?

Reverb simulates the thousands of tiny, overlapping reflections a sound makes bouncing off the walls, floor and ceiling of a physical space before it reaches your ears. Add it to a dry recording — one made in a quiet room or straight into a microphone — and it gains a sense of size, depth and place, instead of sounding flat and close.

This tool builds that reflection pattern algorithmically in your browser, tuned by preset, or convolves your audio against an impulse response you supply for a specific, real captured space. Either way, everything runs locally: you can add reverb to audio without uploading the file anywhere, and hear the result update as you adjust each control, right down to the smallest change in decay or pre-delay.

Reverb types: Room, Studio, Plate, Hall, Cathedral and Ambient

Each preset targets a different kind of space and a different typical decay length, giving you a fast starting point before you fine-tune the individual controls yourself. They range from the tight, almost invisible character of Studio through to the dramatic, room-filling wash of Cathedral, so it helps to think in terms of size and energy first, rather than picking blind from a list of names.

Loading a preset sets wet mix, decay, pre-delay, damping and width together as a starting combination, not a fixed destination carved in stone. Nudge any of the five controls afterward to land somewhere between two presets, or push one further than its default for a more extreme version of the same underlying character, closer to your own ear than to any single label.

Wet mix, decay, pre-delay, damping and width: what each control does

These five controls interact, but each one shapes a distinct part of the effect, and understanding them separately makes it much easier to fix a reverb that almost sounds right. Wet mix is the balance between the dry, unprocessed signal and the wet, reverberated one — low values add a hint of space, high values bury the source inside the reverb itself.

Decay is how long the tail takes to fade out once the direct sound stops, from a short slap to a wash that lingers for seconds. Pre-delay is the gap between the direct sound and when the first reflections arrive — a small amount keeps a voice or lead instrument feeling upfront and clear even inside a large space, while zero pre-delay glues the source and the reverb tightly together.

Damping controls how quickly high frequencies die out inside the tail: heavy damping sounds darker and more natural, like a room full of soft furnishings, while light damping stays brighter and more metallic, closer to a hard-surfaced hall or a vintage plate. Width sets how wide the reverb's stereo image is, independently of the dry signal, so you can keep a mono vocal centered while its reverb spreads out around it.

Using your own impulse response

Beyond the six built-in presets, you can load your own impulse response — a short WAV recording that captures the exact acoustic signature of a real space or object — and this tool will convolve your audio against it. That gives you a specific stairwell, church, hardware unit or found space instead of an algorithmic approximation, if you have a recorded impulse response to work with.

This is the same convolution technique many reverb plugins use to reproduce real halls and studios, just applied to whatever impulse response you bring to it. Once it is loaded, the wet mix, width and damping controls still apply on top of it, so you can blend and shape a custom space the same way you would with any of the six built-in presets.

Reverb for vocals, podcasts and music

On lead vocals, a little goes a long way: Room or Plate at a modest wet mix, with some pre-delay so consonants stay clear, adds polish without burying the words. For podcasts and voiceover, the honest advice is to use very little reverb or skip it entirely — untreated dialogue with reverb layered on is measurably harder to follow, which matters more than atmosphere for spoken word. See our guide on reverb decay versus wet mix for a closer look at balancing the two.

On music, the right choice depends on the part: Hall or Cathedral suits pads, strings and other sustained sounds that are meant to feel large; Plate is a common choice for drums and vocals that need brightness without an obvious room; Ambient works well as a background wash under a whole mix rather than on any one element. Try more than one preset on the same part before settling — the differences are easy to hear side by side, and less obvious in isolation.

What to expect

This is an algorithmic simulation of a space, or a convolution against an impulse response you provide — it is not a recording of a real physical room unless your impulse response is. Heavy reverb layered under heavy compression later in a mix can start to sound washy or lose definition, so it is worth checking a track in context, not just soloed. Because the full tail is kept on export, a file with a long decay and high wet mix will run a little longer than the original recording, which is expected rather than a bug.

For a different kind of atmosphere built around slower playback rather than added space, see slowed and reverb, and for shaping the underlying tone before or after reverb, use the equalizer — cutting mud or harshness first often makes a reverb tail sound cleaner than reaching for less wet mix ever could on its own, since a clean source gives the reverb less to smear together.

Guides for this tool