The first reverb effects, introduced in the 1930s, were created by playing recordings through loudspeakers in reverberating spaces and recording the sound. The American producer Bill Putnam is credited for the first artistic use of artificial reverb in music, on the 1947 song "Peg o' My Heart" by the Harmonicats. Putnam placed a microphone and loudspeaker in the studio bathroom to create an echo chamber, adding an "eerie dimension".

A plate reverb system uses an electromechanical transducer, similar to the driver in a loudspeaker, to create vibrations in a large plate of sheet metal. The plate's motion is picked up by one or more contact microphones whose output is an audio signal which may be added to the original "dry" signal. Plate reverb was introduced in the late 1950s by Elektromesstechnik with the EMT 140.


Spring reverbs, introduced by Bell Labs, use a set of springs mounted inside a box. They work similarly to plate reverb, with a transducer and pickup placed at either end of the spring. They were popular in the 1960s, and were first used by the Hammond company to add reverb to Hammond organs. They became popular with guitarists, including surf musicians such as Dick Dale, as they could easily be built into guitar amplifiers. They were also used by dub reggae musicians such as King Tubby. Laurens Hammond was granted a patent on a spring-based mechanical reverberation system in 1939.

Digital reverb units simulate reverb by using multiple delay lines with fading trails, giving the impression of sound bouncing off surfaces. Some digital effects allow users to independently adjust early and late reflections. Digital reverb was introduced in 1976 by EMT with the EMT 250, and became popular in the 1980s.

A bucket brigade or bucket-brigade device (BBD) is a discrete-time analogue delay line, developed in 1969 by F. Sangster and K. Teer of the Philips Research Labs in the Netherlands. It consists of a series of capacitance sections. The stored analogue signal is moved along the line of capacitors, one step at each clock cycle. The name comes from analogy with the term bucket brigade, used for a line of people passing buckets of water.

In most signal processing applications, bucket brigades have been replaced by devices that use digital signal processing, manipulating samples in digital form.  Despite bucket brigades being analog in their representation of individual signal voltage samples, these devices are still discrete in the time domain and thus are limited by the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem; both the input and output signals are generally low-pass filtered. The input must be low-pass filtered to avoid aliasing effects, while the output is low-pass filtered for reconstruction.  Because of this, there is no strong reason to prefer bucket brigades over digital delay effects, now that digital processing has become widely and cheaply available. Nonetheless, bucket brigades do still see use in specialty applications, such as guitar effects.
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