Reverb for classical guitar

"Best" is subjective.

Start with a good clean and full recording of the guitar. Then experiment. 

Setting there trying one after another and playing with settings will likely not solve the problem. You will have so many options to choose from. Your ears will fatigue trying to choose the right one. 

Try to narrow it down to a few that you think sound good and save  them as presets.   Then come back later and try one or two, but in the mix, not soloed. (unless it is a solo performance of course) 

It's simply a matter of trial & error until you get it narrowed down. I find that even when I do hit the "perfect" verb and save it... the next time, in the next song, that verb isn't "perfect" and must be tweezed in one way or another. Amount, room size, decay, etc.... 

I've never recorded classical guitar, but I think I'd start with the most natural-sounding room reverbs, as opposed to plates. I'd even forego my standard go-to algorithmic reverb, ValhallaRoom, and try a convolution first.

I've usually only recorded classical guitar in larger halls and churches.  Some don't need any reverb, but those that do usually benefit from a good algo like Flux Ircam verb.  It is really nice as it allows the natural sound of the room to pass through without much trouble, and it is silky smooth unlike most "plate" simulations.  

If you are recording in a dead room, I would suggest using a convolution hall from either Waves or Aliverb (if you are in the market that is).  If the tail isn't quite right, a tiny bit of algorithmic reverb can smooth it out. 

Tom, 

Many will let you demo their Reverbs - some quite liberally - like 'Redline Reverb' by 112db and 'EaReverb' by EaReckon to name a few.


Valhalla Room & their others are also very popular.

I think Altiverb[?] is highly regarded, but is not cheap. [I think that's what it's called.]

My personal favorite is 'Fabrik R' from tc electronic, although you need their hardware to run it - but 'top notch drop-dead georgeous' in my opinion. 

I've had excellent results with my old standby reverb- Lexicon Pantheon which came with earlier versions of Sonar.  It always takes some tweaking, but worth it in the end.

Good luck!

One experiment that is fun to try if you can is to record in the kitchen or another room than you normally would. I tried this for some acoustic guitar once, and I got some pretty cool results. All it took was some long cables and a remote.

You do have to be a little careful sometimes recording in bathrooms because the room may have some nasty resonances and make some notes jump out more than others etc. It is a good idea to look at the dimensions of a bathroom and plug those values into the formula that relates speed of sound to wavelength and frequency.

eg Freq = Speed of sound/ length

Speed of sound can be feet per sec eg 1120 ft/s or 344 metres/second.

Hard surfaces in a bathroom will encourage sound to bounce off walls with great vigour. One of my bathroom dimensions is 2.2 metres which equates to a frequency of 156 Hz. So this frequency could boom or null out. Right in the lower register of the classical guitar. 

An interesting thing to do is to put a quality speaker in your bathroom and feed a sine wave sweep from 40 to 10KHz etc. Put an omni directional quality mic in there and have a look at the level variations. You might be pretty surprised. Funny things will happen at the three room dimension frequencies for sure.

Recording in a more dead environment and up a little closer and using a very nice sounding convolution reverb with a nice small live room to my ears sounds a lot better.