A SUPER CHEAP DIY Spring Reverb YOU Can Make Yourself!

Here at PresentDayProduction we love a bit of DIY to save some money, so we thought we'd show you the best way to get a spring reverb sound for cheap! Subscribe to our channel to watch the subsequent episodes explaining how to make a home-made one from a Slinky!

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The idea of using a headphone amp is simply amazing!
Even the most basic and crappy sounding one should work absolutely fine for this, making a stereo spring reverb very affordable.

[no_direction]

Thanks for this. Little bit of a tip for the recovery circuit I came across whilst experimenting. A cheap phono preamp (I'm using a behringer pp400 for £20, plenty of others out there), designed to boost/convert phono signals from a turntable to line level seems to work really well, and is a really cheap way to get a decent gain boost with correctish impedance without noise.

The connections are all RCA, it's all stereo, the impedance of the input of phono preamps is relatively high compared to the spring tank output, the gain boost with them is decent/gets it up to line level - with an output impedance designed for connecting to line level equipment. Only *slight* drawback is these preamps have RIAA eq baked into them, but that's not neccesarily a bad thing as it seems to help with high end noise - and besides you're just going to eq the verb in the DAW anyway. Currently doing this and it sounds fab. Hope this helps someone.

[Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn]

At the studio I learned in, the spring reverb was a 6' length of PVC drain pipe leaning in the corner of the control room! Hitting it with the chair was a memorable experience!!! 😁

[jjcale]

Where's the DIY spring reverb? Disappointing!

[jonathanboyce]

I bet you’re going to use a plastic drain pipe and stick a slinky in it, if not you should. When I were a lad, it was called a GBS (the Great British Spring). I used one for years and it was wonderful. I very stupidly gave it away to a mate, when I got my first digital reverb, the original Alesis Midiverb, the one in the weird little plastic box. I’ve always regretted it, they go for about a grand on eBay, these days and nobody with any sense wants an old Midiverb. Keep up the good work, chaps, I’m loving this.

[raycochrane]

I had an enormous Spring Reverb pedal. Well, actually, it was an ancient Eminar six channel 200w powered mixer with a spring reverb tank inside. The mixer was nice but a little noisy and VERY heavy. I hadn't used it for a couple of decades and then decided to try to use the reverb signal for guitar. It worked using the available ins n outs of the old thing and sounded pretty cool BUT was a lot of effort to set up and being large as well as heavy was quite cumbersome. I As we moved states recently I gave it to a gigging musician who planned to use the mixer for foldback. Had I seen this video 12 months ago I'd have stripped out the reverb tank and followed your instructions. Timing is everything.

[trevfisher]

At 13 years old I had a H&H PA Amp. If you bumped into it.the spring reverb inside made a fantastic noise, so we used to do that on purpose. There were only 3 TV channels in the UK at the time and the internet hadn't been invented.

[kadiummusic]

There is definitely something magical about making something yourself and the more Heath Robinson the better! Does anyone else remember making those DIY fx kits that companies like Maplin used to sell? You'd get a small pcb board, a load of components and a photocopied sheet of instructions. A few hours and a couple of solder burns later and you'd have a phaser! 😃

[fortheoneswhocare]

I've been toying the idea of building myself a spring reverb exactly as you described for a long time. I guess it's time to finally do it. Thanks for the push !

[manoir_blues]

Thank you very much. Now, i have a very cheap spring reverb!

[untruenorth]

As they say on the internet: “Today I learned…”

And my first thought when you said “but what if you want a bigger reverb, a much bigger one” was “slinky, LOL”. I really did not expect to be right. Very much looking forward to *that* video!

[reread]

This is great! I never knew the history of spring reverb. I just always knew that I really hated it 🤣. Seriously thank you very much for this video. I learned something today 👏👏👏👏👏👏

[Markherczeg]

Look forward to the DIY plate reverb build!

[glaubergarcez]

Another thing you can do as well is put some cotton balls on the springs to tame the tail of it and you can really exaggerate the reverb on the mix without drowning in reverb.

[nigeltedbury]

Got an acutronics 9EB2C1B tank providing spring reverb on my modular synth and always wondered why it was so quiet. Output ohms! Not what I was expecting to learn from this video, but so glad i didi! Thank you.

[brunoromiti]

you won me over with “professional level boing ➡️”

[galgogergo]

Thank you guys for the very informative, straight-to-the-point video. 'twas a pleasure to watch!
Looking forward to the next one on the bigger spring :)) Thanks for making these, highly appreciated!

[felixdorn]

great! Just ordered two Reverb tanks and will be recording some crazy dubstyle thunderclaps with them soon 😊

[murraywebster]

My first reverb was a Great British Spring, a small extra function was if you needed a thunder sound just give it a slap, hours of fun with that hitting it with different objects, being a piece of drainage pipe it was nearly indestructible, oh the memories, we eventually covered it with material, well it looked like a bit of drainage pipe screwed to the all after all, and our studio cat used it as a scratching pole, that sounded quite interesting sometimes and it did land on some records and even a couple of radio jingles

[joaoantoniovione]

At the start of the pandemic I went full-on guerrilla and built one of these from an old 4" speaker and a shower heating resistance attached to it... on the other end of the spring, earbuds as pickups. All housed into a DIY wooden box, built to the 70s dbx decilinear series style - even the paint was DIY, powdered graphite mixed with glue.

The sound was pretty boxy, sig/noise ratio was narrow but it was fun nonetheless. Your video inspired me to do it again, properly this time.