When did you first start collecting vintage reverb units?
I started collecting older equipment probably in the mid-'90s. It’s really in the last year that I started collecting specifically old reverb units, just because the music I’m working on now is a lot more sort of spacious and atmospheric than music I’ve worked on in the past and the old reverb units really help that.

Can you tell our readers a little bit about how they work?
It’s like if you’re in a gymnasium and you clap your hands and you hear the sound go on, that’s reverb. Starting in the '40s ad '50s they started making electronic reverb units by either passing the audio signal through a piece of metal or through some springs or a small chamber and passing the audio through that. The ones that I collect are more the spring reverbs. They tend to have a very cheap vintage sound, which I really like.

Where do you look for them?
Ebay. I do miss the old days of going to a foreign city and trolling around, going to weird old vintage equipment stores. But even the die-hard purists are on e-bay now because your chances of finding something obscure and unique in a second hand store are pretty slim

How many do you have?
As far as interesting reverb units go, I’d say about 20. The ones that I have the greatest love for are the ones that seemingly come with a narrative attached to them. You know, when you get a piece of equipment from the '50s or '60s you think of the context in which it would be used, like an organist in a wedding band or an electronic piano player in a bar somewhere in New Jersey in 1964. The moment you turn them on that’s pretty much what it sounds like.

Do you have a favorite?
It’s blue and it’s called the surf mix. It was built in the '50s or the early '60s to try and recreate the surf sound that bands like The Ventures and Dick Dale. But the truth is, as a piece of equipment it looks much better than it sounds.

Did you rely on these machines a lot on your new album?
On Wait for Me, almost every functioning unit I have was used. A lot of new equipment is sonically fairly limitless. You can get synthesizers that literally have a thousand sounds. These old reverb units each have one very distinctive sound, there’s no versatility. They take a small tight sound and make it bigger and more expansive. If you listen to the first Doors album or Jefferson Airplane or even going to back to doo-wop and blues from the late '50s and '60s, they put reverb on everything, from the drums to the bass to the guitar, the keyboard the vocals. The reverb is almost like the fifth member of the band.

Did you adopt that same dramatic use of reverb on Wait For Me?
There’s way more reverb on my record than there would be on most contemporary records. Today when they use reverb they’re trying to use it in a very subtle way so you don’t even notice it. What I love about old records is there’s no subtlety whatsoever. When making my record, I gave myself the liberty to do that as well.

What do you think of the exceptions to that like Times New Viking and Wavves who actively use reverb to achieve a lo-fi sound?
I’m all in favor of any sonic experimentation regardless of the genre or the form. In the old days the record label would try to convince you not to be experimental because they wanted you to be conventional and sell a lot of records. But now there’s no real incentive to be conventional so it gives musicians free reign to do whatever they want to do.

Photo by Jason Rodgers.