Reverb

[rock soderstrom]

There are a handful of plugins (effects and processors) that have optional usb controllers, but those can quickly clutter the workspace. Plus, DAW plugins automatically recall the session’s settings, rather than notating an outboard units settings. I like you idea in principle, but in practice it takes a certain dedication to a slower workflow. I’m interested to see how this works for your team.

It's true, there are already few hardware controllers for plugins and they tend to occupy the desk, but with a touchscreen solution you don't have to write anything down, they are just plugins as well.

I think the advantage of such solutions lies in the better communication with the musician during tracking, you're not just staring at the computer monitor armed with a mouse, but are much more open to what's happening in the recording room.

Another advantage I think is the fact that, especially in a band (rehearsal/demo recording)context, they usually work without a dedicated operator/audio engineer, so simple tools for controlling the rather static recording situation are a real advantage.

 

[rock soderstrom]

Secondhand/inexpensive tablet, running some KVM software? You'd need wifi on the host, of course. I can't think of any showstoppers at the moment, and I'll be doing something similar, but I haven't actually done it yet.

That's a good idea, I've already thought about it. An old iPad or similar comes with everything it needs!

I even still have an old iPad 3, but unfortunately it's already in permanent use as a sound generator on my master keyboard. Good old Garageband still sounds convincing after all these years...

 

[gyraf]

I'm still trying to persuade the good people at Relab to support the real hardware larc..

 

[allergies.for.all]

I’ve been working on a cover of Laura Nyro’s the Wind with my partner and I’m always floored by the sound of reverb on 60’s recordings. I’ve got a cheap lexicon I don’t use very much and I also have some Waves Abbey Road plug-ins I like until I’m actually using them.

I find it very difficult to achieve the level of lushness and presence yet somehow not drowning in it like in recordings of Laura Nyro, the Beach Boys, or Brazilian stuff like early Gal Costa.

I’m sure they had access to amazing plates and probably rooms designed for certain sounds, but for some like me who has a studio full of DIY equipment and a computer, how can I get close to that sound?

Is there any reverb builds that y’all know of? A plugin many recommend? Or should I just set up a speaker and a mic in my garage or something? ;D

It's not just the chamber, but the level of the signal hitting the speaker in the chamber, and the gain of the pre recapturing the verb. If you listen to those old Beach Boys the reverb is super saturated. Part of what makes it lush is saturation. I've had good results just using a big room (or small, doesn't matter that much). Speaker on one side, mic on the other, and CRANK the speaker aux. Then on the capture mic, crank that gain. Use a compressor on your capture, shelf the nastiness out of the high end. Another thing I find useful is then compressing the vocal or instrument in series with the chamber capture, so they don't sound like separate entities (Rather than using something like an aux send for the reverb).

For the Brazilian style verb, pick up an old Ross mixer from the 70's or with a built in sprint reverb. People give them away.

 

[Pinokio]

Nice thread! Good suggestion on vst’s I didn’t know about.


(A bold statement but if we suppose: the perfect / most natural system of artificial reverb doesn’t excist… the following would be fun to mess around with):

To the best of my knowledge is that one thing to define a realistic reverb is that it’s mostly in the early reflections. There are some papers on the net reflecting this with measurements. It’s very hard to calculate the ER of rooms. This is only logical because that’s the part of the reverb on the hitch we can define a localization. The (long) tail is much more diffuse.
-> modulating (examples: panning, slight frequency shift, HPF, dynamically different, adding tonal resonances) the send signal that goes to an reverb with only ER part of a plugin that goes to another bus with only the tail / diffusion part of a reverb plugin (which also gets the channel signal).. this way we could mix different verb. plug-ins to make a more realistic or carefully designed reverb sounds.


Also both are dynamic and not static (as in an IR.) good convolution and algoverbs deal with this principles/information on the bases of the sends panning. Which is most likely a made up setting with variables that conclude in a non linear frequency response.
-> keep in mind the position of the players vs. the listeners position vs. Placement in the room. There are some free IR calculators that let you design a room with different players / (speaker) positions. Since it’s not close to a real ER we could approach this as an in between reverb part for a more realistic panning. (First ER, as above mentioned - Panning ER IR+ Tail)

Then there is the phenomenon of room-modes . The thing that could happen in various sizes is a pitch depending frequency based reverb time. Thus if a note is played short the reverb time is shorter then if that note is played longer. There are different types of room-modes and the release shape and summing (+ kinda feedback) plays with some patterns we could only approximate.
-> A fun thing to do is using a “cepstrum lifter” (for the unknown: this is kinda the fft of an fft) with that tool we can set a frequency + length threshold and for example filter the rest out and put the residu signal tru some extra apf, resonators or rt granular stages before sending it to the above kinda reverb busses.

One thing to keep in mind (if you like / may depend on genre) is having a phase coherent sum… or not especially in the ER phase in combination with your source. Sometimes I like to use transient or body depend dynamic eq (or multiband compression like dmg) ducking the clashing or masking frequencies in the reverb part a bit and thus stimulating the air pressure movement which is stronger from the player.
-> on that note.. having a transient splitter cut or reduce the transient thus sending the the body (in an 3 or 4 way linear xo path) will help with realism a lot. Also I like to give the left and right signal different values for the attack time. This again will give (imo) a more natural placement in the simulation room (or at this point imagined room)

Just like almost anything else we do in mixing there just to many variables to come to conclusions or one way solutions.
-> and just like many audio processing things it I find it nice to send the whole sum of the above to a couple of busses. For the last bit of dynamic control/ eq / saturation etc. to glue the things together. Stereo and coherent analyzer could help/navigate here for mono and angle compatibility. Some modern stft plug-ins could help here. For example a “reverb remover” algorithm can give us more parameters to play stylistically if we like. For example there are stft coherent extractors and splitters, ssb modulators and more. (Fun to play with!! But I could also highly recommend some older fundamental Blumlein papers and stereo principles for getting realistic stereo image (freq vs td and ld curves))

maybe long post.. but those are somethings I found useful in dsp. It gives me a lot of times such more dynamic depth in the soundstage image. And ofcourse it doesn’t have to stay itb but problems we face then are also nice and endless but I could share some thoughts about that + the combination of the above another time if people would like that.

 

[abbey road d enfer]

Sometimes I like to use transient or body depend dynamic eq (or multiband compression like dmg) ducking the clashing or masking frequencies in the reverb part a bit and thus stimulating the air pressure movement which is stronger from the player.

Can you elaborate on this? Particularly "the air pressure movement which is stronger from the player."

 

[iomegaman]

So I came back and visited this thread once again...

I just spent a week going thru my plugin reverbs and my hardware stuff to see what I liked...since my last post I've added a TON of reverbs, including Altiverb, EVERYTHING UAD makes, all of Relabs stuff, Liquid Sonics stuff (reverbrate3/etc), tc electronics, DID NOT add the Lexicon Native stuff since they seem to be in the thro's of being subsumed by a larger audio company and don't even have Mac Silicone ready stuff (besides being pricey...it looks like the Lexicon Native stuff is not long for this audio world)...added the older (older from today) Verbsuite Classics from Slate...have all the Quantec plugins now, pretty much every reverb plugin known except for a few because during covid I was forced to hide in a small room alone for sessions...

I think my estimate is I've spent about $2000 in reverb plugins since 2020...all the IR stuff...(Altiverb really rules this arena)...

I did get the Kurzweil Rumor to work quite well via SPDIF into my Antelope Audio Discrete 8 at 48k and it sounds "usable"...I use it as an "insert" in Pro Tools and after letting the audio engine do its latency calculation its seems fine, especially since it goes in digital and comes out digital.

The newest version of Logic comes with a "Quantec" that is very usable and quite tweakable...but here's what I detest about plugin reverbs...the amount of "twiddling" you have to do to make it sound natural ends up with some serious ear fatigue and "knob bias deception"...for instance the Bob Clearmountain reverbs by Apogee are lauded by a lot of people but they sound like crap to me, I have both Spaces and Domains from them and they were not cheap and I never use them...mainly because they REQUIRE you to tweak the hell out of them...the entire process starts to feel synthetic and then it sounds that way because you know you've tweaked filters to make an artificial moon landing look real.

At one point I was seriously considering adding an AMS RMX16 to my 500 series rack, but I read some comment about it being DSP and using the SHARC processor and for that I now have about 12 UAD SHARC chips in various devices and the RMS version in their software so it would be redundant and a wasted $1200...(according to SOS its the exact same chip as UAD uses and the same code: Read it here)...

To get to the end of my point without eye fatigue I have come to the conclusion that reverb is really sort of a seasonal flavor...at one point I thought the Kurzweil was junk, now I do not, at that former point I thought the Valhalla stuff was the bee's knees, now I don't...I let my Slate Subscription fade into obscurity because there was nothing in it I lauded and recently I went and searched until I found a second hand plugin market where I could buy the "Verbsuite Classics perpetual" because I think the RMS stuff in it is amazing...(knobcloud is a decent place to search for used plugins if you're into that sort of thing)...

At any rate my next adventure is to pick up a Dante USB stereo set and run it up into the cement staircase/and or brick basement via ethernet and set up a speaker/mic to create my own chamber...

 

[Brian Roth]

Live chambers are pretty cool, but perhaps "one trick pony".

Bri

 

[iomegaman]

Live chambers are pretty cool, but perhaps "one trick pony".

Bri

Yea I was kinda thinking I'd do some IR's of my on and import them into Altiverb...they have a way for you to import and make your own...then I'd be done...but it would also sort of inform my brain about how well IR's actually sound compared to the real thing...sometimes the audience we need to convince sits in the theater of our own mind.

 

[evil grill]

I have with good results used cheap rack reverbs (phonic, Alesis) in protools with plug in EQs as pre-emphasis and de-emphasis.

 

[totoxraymond]

Yea I was kinda thinking I'd do some IR's of my on and import them into Altiverb...they have a way for you to import and make your own...then I'd be done...but it would also sort of inform my brain about how well IR's actually sound compared to the real thing...sometimes the audience we need to convince sits in the theater of our own mind.

I recently had the opportunity to capture my own IRs for a cartoon show i'm working on. This show takes place mostly in château de Versailles at LouisXIV era. So we wanted to get as close as possible to the real places.

I captured my impulses in quadraphonic because we deliver a surround mix, but it would be even easier to record a stereo impulse.
I used a battery powered speaker made by JBL as a sound source. (The one that has a mini-jack, i don't rely on bluetooth). And a Sound Device MixPre6 as recorder but i think any decent field recorder would do the job. My microphone setup was 4 AT2031 as a double ORTF for convenience and portability. (Essentially one microphone stand and that's it).
I used Voxengo Deconvolver for sweep generation and deconvolving and Steinberg's REVerence as a convolution plug-in.

I'm really pleased with the result, I really feel like my characters are in the real room now would it be the Gallerie des Glaces or la Chambre du Roi.
What I found the most impressive, was that we recorded impulses of service corridors which are quite narrow and when I tested the impulses, I could really feel the narrowness of the place thanks to the IR without touching my panner, where I usually would play with width for this sort of things.

My experience with convolution reverbs is that most of them are really good, what makes one stand out in front of the others is the amount and quality of built-in impulses and the ease of loading you own impulses. I think Altiverb really shines by the amount of impulses they provide, but most of the time i end up using REVerence which is included in my DAW (Nuendo) for convenience.

 

[iomegaman]

I'm finding a lot of these older devices (1993-98-sih) are using FPGA...took apart the Kurzweil Rumor to see whats inside, reminded me that Young-Chang the piano company bought Kurzweil in the 90's because they have a big proprietary chip on the board...(probably a Kurzweil chip rebranded by them)...but sitting on the other side of the board is a Xilinx Spartan which is the little brother of the SHARC chip...poked around found the ADDA converters inside were not the best (older AKM's)...but the Spartan allows outside clocking and via Spdif I can simply go straight in and out and bypass those older chips...the Spartan only allows clocking up to 60kHz...so we stay at 48k via an Antelope device...and we simply end up with a different flavor of UAD/AMS16/ dsp code reverb...

I did just win an evilbay auction for a Behringer V-Verb Pro, which for some odd reason Behringer pulled from the market a year or so after releasing...I think that was back in the "we don't reverse engineer gear, you do" days and they were avoiding lawsuits...

It will run AES/Spdif at 96kHz so I'll see how it fairs...

It's starting to feel like ever since Phil Collins absurdly over-verbed "In the Air tonite" on Miami Vice that reverbs have been dsp and we have gotten accustomed to not knowing the difference.

 

[TwentyTrees]

I did just win an evilbay auction for a Behringer V-Verb Pro...

I use one of these for "comfort" reverb when tracking vocals, it does the job and some of the algorithms are pretty nice. One note of caution (beyond the usual stuff like recap it, and remove the hot glue from the ribbon connectors inside) is that the bottom of the internal power supply in mine was shorting to the case, which meant a nasty electric shock when I first plugged it in!

 

[iomegaman]

Yea the first thing I do with just about everything I buy these days is open up the case and look inside before I power them up, especially evilbay stuff...and I've heard the horror stories on the offending glue issue all over the worldwideweb per these units...

 

[iomegaman]

So I got the evilBay Behringer V-Verb 96 Pro today...oddly enough it is brand spanking new...never been out of the plastic, still has the film on on the display and the power cord was still in plastic as well...went ahead and opened it up...saw the glue...not terrible but REALLY BAD FORM for a vendor...cleaned it all off and checked the chips...it running a SHARC adsp-2116 which is no slouch but it is of course from 2004...but then again so are most of the UAD sharcs so I'm not complaining...it also runs a Triscend ARM chip so I don't think Behringer was goofing off here...I'm going to bypass the Cirrus Logic CS-4272 via AES connected to my Symphony MKII but first I need to read some of the manual and get used to that horrid piss colored LED screen.

I know Behringer only sold these things for a few years...it was a flash in the pan reverb and there are rumors Lexicon was threatening a lawsuit, what I think actually happened is the profit margin on these was so small and the glue issue so large it was more profitable to EOL these units and move on.