Create Reverse Reverb Effects In Ableton 11

Demonstrating an easy reverse reverb effect that can help with creating unique transitions, textures and ambiance in your songwriting. These techniques can be applied in various situations, such as when working with instruments and/or vocals.

Right click on an existing audio channel to insert new audio track. This will be our new audio channel dedicated to resampling. Resampling will allow us to internally record any audio in our DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] without effecting any audio track directly.

Click the dropdown menu on audio channel and select "Resampling" to enter resampling mode.

Once entering resample mode, you should notice the channel's "record" button light up. Simply clicking the record button will arm the track for recording (button will turn red). Any audio that plays while this button is turned on will internally record to this channel; however, recording must be initiated first.

Simply add any reverb plug-in to the instrument track (I used Ableton's stock reverb) and tweak the settings according to preference. In this case, we increased the reverb "decay" to 10s and the "dry/wet" to 100% to isolate the reverb effect. All other parameters were left on their defaults.

Now that our reverb effect is set up, we want to "solo" or isolate the corresponding audio track by clicking "S" on the audio channel (in this case vocal), click record located at the top of the DAW (displayed as a white circle) and let the audio play out. You should see a new audio clip appear in real-time.

Delete the reverb plug-in on original audio channel then reverse the newly resampled audio by simply pressing "R" on keyboard. Alternatively, you can right-click on the resampled audio and choose "reverse clips" on dropdown menu. At this point we can move the sample placement to right before our original sample.

Now that the audio is placed correctly, we can listen back and hear how it sounds! I applied this same reverb effect to the other instruments and it resulted in smooth reverse swells leading up to our initial audio clips. Once again, these techniques can be applied to any audio you see fit. Additionally, you can process these sounds further with other effects (ie: EQ, Delay, Distortion) to make these clips even more unique to your production!

Results of applying these reverb techniques!