Site Review: Tank-FX.com

In any reasonably priced studio (home or pro), one of the elusive sounds is reverb. Sure, there are any number of free reverb effects available, both software and hardware, but they all fall a little short of the ideal mark: real echoes in a real environment. Sure, you can get those echoes by recording vocals in a bathroom (a la Jim Morrison), but that is really impractical for most reverb needs. Some effects are getting closer (like convolution reverb) but there is a lot of CPU power you'll eat in a hurry when you use one.

I have recently found a German site that is a really fresh take on the problem of reverb. Tank-FX (http://www.tank-fx.com) is a site with a unique claim - they will play your sample in a concrete water tank and record the resulting sound. As their subtitle says, it is "Non-Virtual Reverb".

The Tank
My apologies if I get any of these details wrong - the details on the site are only in German, and I'm at the mercy of a semi-garbled translation by Babelfish. The tank itself is part of the Oberhausener train station, built in 1932, and was originally built to hold water that was used to refill steam locomotives. This tank is massive - 11 meters (36 feet) tall, 7m (23 feet) in diameter. Look around the site (especially the tab "aufbau", which translates as "structure") for pictures of the tank that they're using. Massive. Somehow, the operators of the site were able to get the permission to install speakers on the bottom of the tank and suspend microphones in the top of the tank. This is all wired to a Unix server, and suddenly you have a new FREE reverb toy online.

How To Use It?
This is really simple to use. Click the red "Record Sample" button at the top of the screen, and you get a clever rack-mount style interface. Samples are by default Normalized, but you can skip this with the "Bypass Normalize" button. Output format is selectable as MP3, FLAC, or Ogg-Vorbis formats. You also select you Wet/Dry mix.

When you hit the "Record" button, you are taken to another screen where you Browse to select your upload file. Uploaded files must be WAV files. This seems odd, since you can't get the output back as a WAV file, but we can still work with it. In a non-user friendly move, the "Do It" button is instead labeled "Submit Query". Then you wait for it to do its job and it gives you a file back that you can do a "Save as..." to save locally.

My Experiences So Far
I've been playing with Tank-FX for a couple days, and the results are pretty good, with a few words of caution. First, I have had mixed results when using any wet/dry mix. It seems that even a 50/50 mix causes the dry to seriously overpower the wet. I think the much lower levels of the wet sound are not properly compensated for in their mixing routines.

I have also found that as of this writing, the right channel is basically dead. You get a wash of static and only a faint trace of the sound. This was done with 100% wet signal, so you can hear the tank by itself. It's fairly simple to pull the MP3 output into Audacity and split the channels (and discard the right channel), and the sound really jumps out at you.

My recommendation is to run everything at 100% wet, strip the right channel, and mix it back to the original either in Audacity or within your DAW.

I have also seem on their comments board some people have gotten unwelcome environmental sounds back in their samples. Mostly banging, most likely from construction or other heavy equipment in the general area. This seems to be more of a problem if you're running sounds during the daytime (in Germany) and not a problem if you're running during German night hours. Do a little time research, and you should be fine.

Limitations
The limitations on the Tank-FX site are fairly few. You have to upload in WAV only. The file cannot be more than 60 seconds. Output in MP3, FLAC, or Ogg-Vorbis only. The space is a single defined BIG space, so you're only getting BIG reverb.

Yet, it would seem that all of these limitations still beat the heck out of digital fake-reverb if you're going for the big hall reverb sound. Of course, this is not the type of reverb you'd want to put your whole track through, but for enhancing a specific instrument, voice, or sound bite, this is a great option.

Wrap-up
I honestly think Tank-FX is one of the coolest net freebies I have ever come across. The limitations are really a lot less than your average free VST's limitations. And there is no "this is nice, but how about pay for more options" angle that we have all grown so accustomed to seeing. Check it out and give them praise on their board. This is one site that deserves to get some positive credit.