"Room Ambience" when all your stuff is Direct-In / Software...

[mholloway]

I've been feeling lately that a key difference between my (and others) modern, in-the-box productions and the sound of classic, studio-recorded albums has to do with Room Ambience, entirely stemming from the fact that in those older recordings most instruments (perhaps even synths) were recorded with microphones, and thereby captured some of the 'Space' of the room or studio where they were being played.

This poses a distinct problem for the modern 'in the box' musician, where 100% of instruments (even guitars and bass, not just soft-synths!) are direct-in / software. There's no 'air', there's no 'room ambience' -- there's no subtle Space captured around the instruments. I spend a lot of time struggling with the "too dry" feeling in the mix. I don't want big washes of obvious reverb, I just want these synths to have an organic sense of natural space that isnt' there when you just playback a softsynth.

It's that kind of reverb that almost isn't reverb because you don't hear it as reverb, you hear it as a tail-less sense of place. Most of the time you only recognize it's a thing that exists when you realize it's missing!

So, obviously a reverb plugin seems the best approach to solving this, but I'm struggling there. Plugin reverbs are easy and great at doing big washes, halls, special fx, etc.... but I really struggle to get decent, subtle "felt not heard" room ambiences out of them.

So far, my best results are from avoiding Algorithmic altogether (it always sounds 'blurred' and/or detached to me, for this type of work) and using IRs in Liquid Sonics Reverberate plugin. I'm getting *pretty good* results this way, but I want to discuss this here and learn about what other people are doing, if anything, to capture that "room ambience" of mic'd room recordings when working exclusively in the box....any and all tips / ideas / strategies / thoughts on this matter would be very interesting to me!

some specific areas I'm curious about --

1. anybody tried actually re-amping a software synth and recording it with a mic? any interesting / worthwhile results from doing this?

2. any thoughts on more creative / less known approaches to using Reverb in the DAW workspace for creating room ambience across instruments? or just any approach other than what I've mentioned above?

3. any non-reverb methods for this, aside from that in #1? Can't imagine what they would be, but...??

I'd love to hear how / if you guys are tackling this issue! thanks!

-Michael

[Jace-BeOS]

I sometimes feel like my tracks that have some microphone-recorded sounds are more alive than my tracks without, but I'm not sure how much of that is placebo effect because I can't hear room ambiance in those parts with everything else going (and my room sucks). One piece of live flute was pitch-shifted to match the project key, so ambiance isn't natural there even if it could be heard. No one would know the difference there but me, anyway.

Even without vocals or acoustic objects, it still helps to have real guitar in my stuff, but that's totally digital, so no room sound is present. I think it might just be that variety of sound sources is a necessary spice for me. I also like a lot of distortion, so that tends to put more sonic chaos into a sound than without, which seems to be part of what's important about live sounds/microphoned guitars/cabinets and such...(??)

[tibah]

Dimension Expander comes to mind. I know it as an effect from Massive, but you can also get it as a recreation from Steve Duda:

https://xferrecords.com/freeware/

As far as I know, this is simply using early reflections and no tail at all, but of course some other reverbs have that too and allow to just ERs. The free Oril River reverb offers presets dedicated to this effect as well. Could be that there are more tricks to Dimension Expander that I don't get or know of, but I would definitely recommend to give it a spin or if you haven't already, take some more time with reverbs that allow to use nothing but ERs.

[pljones]

One of my go to fix ups, where I've got a set of instruments in a recorded jam session that are mic'd, DI'd, sampled and synth, is MuTools' MuVerb. Mostly because I've been using it so long and the presets start of vaguely close to what I'm after - and I feel I best learn one thing before trying something else... Generally, it'll be the occasional DI'd or synth part that need something added, when captured dry. It's then down to just adjusting the settings and keeping the wet/dry as dry as possible just to take that edge off. It can take me several goes to get happy, with a good break between mixing sessions sometimes, too.

[RichieWitch]

Try this trick--it's worked well for me.

Load up a plugin that can do mid/side conversion. Brainworx bx_solo works perfect and it's free (from Plugin Alliance).

Bounce three copies of your sound source: Mid only, L side only, R side only.

Put those three recording on three separate tracks, all running to a group bus. Pan the L side recording hard left, the R side recording hard right.

Now, if you adjust the volume of the two side tracks, you get this very cool expansion effect. Not a stereo widening, but more of a "room presence" sound that makes the original recording sound like it's happening right in front of you. Hard to describe until you try it, but it's like 3D for audio.

Might be what you're looking for.

[mholloway]

Try this trick--it's worked well for me.

Load up a plugin that can do mid/side conversion. Brainworx bx_solo works perfect and it's free (from Plugin Alliance).

Bounce three copies of your sound source: Mid only, L side only, R side only.

Put those three recording on three separate tracks, all running to a group bus. Pan the L side recording hard left, the R side recording hard right.

Now, if you adjust the volume of the two side tracks, you get this very cool expansion effect. Not a stereo widening, but more of a "room presence" sound that makes the original recording sound like it's happening right in front of you. Hard to describe until you try it, but it's like 3D for audio.

Might be what you're looking for.

Very interesting. And conveniently, it should be possible to set this up all on one track in Ableton using an FX Rack (you can make parallel chains, each with their own mix settings). I'll try it out tonight and if it works, I could make one Effect Rack in ableton....which would be very convenient to drop in as needed. Thanks for the input!

[dark water]

If you have a mic (it doesn't have to be great by any means), hook it up to record into your computer, and then play your track through your speakers etc.
Then mix in the new room recorded signal with the ITB signal, perhaps high passing the room recorded signal to avoid bass / major phasing issues.

I always do this when an ITB track sounds too sterile: just the addition of a room recorded track, with high frequencies, adds life and depth to my ITB recordings when needed.

[ramseysounds]

If you have a mic (it doesn't have to be great by any means), hook it up to record into your computer, and then play your track through your speakers etc.
Then mix in the new room recorded signal with the ITB signal, perhaps high passing the room recorded signal to avoid bass / major phasing issues.

I always do this when an ITB track sounds too sterile: just the addition of a room recorded track, with high frequencies, adds life and depth to my ITB recordings when needed.

This is / was a favourite Gareth Jones / Depeche Mode trick, albeit with hardware synths. Same end result though.

[imrae]

I like having a dry room IR on a bus. Playing with relative send levels to room and to slapback delay can control "depth" and put parts in front of/behind each other.

[annode]

I like having a dry room IR on a bus. Playing with relative send levels to room and to slapback delay can control "depth" and put parts in front of/behind each other.

Considering all sounds are mono, set up a simple delay as a send. Put it hard to one side and the sound somewhere on the other side. When multiple instruments are in the mix set up this way, and then putting a hall verb as a master send, will create a great realistic space.

Listen to Miles Davis - Bitches Brew album...it's all like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AR93r-ASWI

[a_Scientist]

Hi, there's a short delay effect on some synths I have, which I believe produces space, it's not even called a delay, but seems that thing creates a stereo delay (stereo involved). It is algorithmic because it's impossible that they inserted IR's in synth. So this creates very short adjustable stereo effect.
It may depend on what kind of sound you want to achieve.
Using IR's as you mentioned is of course one way. I use loaded Ir's in Fruity Convolver. You can make your own IR's too.

[legendCNCD]

We've been using tapedelay with high freq M/S excitement, think U-He Satin style, cut off lowend and mix to taste.. not all the tracks need to be routed there...

[annode]

1. anybody tried actually re-amping a software synth and recording it with a mic? any interesting / worthwhile results from doing this?

Can't say I've tried this but...
- play the track through an amp and get your desired sound.
- Record it to another track using a mic.
- Re-sample the mic'd track 180degs out of phase
- Sync up both tracks and then bounce/sum the two tracks to a third track.
- Mix this summed track into your original track1 for effect.
What I expect is it will mix in just what was particular in the amp sound without
also adding/doubling on original track1 sound.

[a_Scientist]

annode this is a great idea surprise how you just wrote that on forum definitely gonna try though have to thank you

[dark water]

annode this is a great idea surprise how you just wrote that on forum definitely gonna try though have to thank you

It's even more of a surprise how you didn't read my post earlier in the thread, and above your first post, for exactly the same re-amping idea
More to the point, I've actually done it several times through a variety of amps and grotboxes, and I've produced great results with it which have enhanced my songs.
It's cheap, cheerful and it in my experience achieves much better depth and 'air' than ITB ideas, even if you're just running the sound through a ghettoblaster or your monitors into a cheap mic.