What is reverb pre-delay?

Pre-delay is the short gap between a dry sound and the moment its reverb begins. The Ableton Live manual defines it as the delay time before the onset of the first early reflection, which delays the reverberation relative to the input signal.

It is not the same thing as a delay effect: nothing repeats. It only moves the start of the reverb later. For the wider picture of reverb controls and send routing, see reverb and delay basics.

What it changes

• Perceived room size. The manual notes that one's impression of the size of a real room depends partly on this delay (Ableton).
• Clarity of the dry sound. With a gap before the tail, the attack of a vocal syllable or snare hit lands on its own before the reverb arrives.

Typical values

Ableton gives 1 ms to 25 ms as typical for natural sounds (Ableton). Its Hybrid Reverb can also sync pre-delay to the song tempo and feed some of the pre-delay output back into its input, so the setting can become a creative effect rather than only a realism control.

What we think

Pre-delay is the most useful reverb control most people leave at zero. Our habit: when a vocal sounds pushed back by its reverb, raise pre-delay before you turn the reverb down. Going past the natural 25 ms range keeps a big, long tail while letting the words stay up front; in our experience that often reads as "closer" rather than "wetter". Tempo-synced values are a good starting point on rhythmic parts because the tail then starts on a musical subdivision. That is judgement, not measurement; set it by ear in context, soloed reverbs lie.