Signaldust release: Abstract Chamber

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Abstract Chamber is my new super simple (interface wise anyway) reverb plugin.

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>Download link< (webpage in a few days as usual)

As is obvious from the screenshot, this isn't exactly a tweakers dream. Instead I've done my best to minimize the controls so it can be setup in about ten seconds.

This is pretty much the polar opposite of my previous reverb Tila in almost every way imaginable. In fact it was designed to be so from the very beginning: this one was designed for long modulated tails. The two also play fairly well together so I've had some success using them together in series or parallel (ie Tila for early character, this one for tails). YMMV.

Anyway, this been in development forever and I've come to the conclusion that I need yet another algorithm for the "ultimate reverb of unlimited flexiblity"
so I'm releasing it as-is in hope that it's useful.

The funny manual follows

So on the left we have predelay which is what it says, reverb time which is theoretical mid-frequency RT60, and modulation which controls both the depth and rate of internal modulation (at low settings mostly the depth, at high settings mostly the rate).

Try modulation at 60-70% and reverb time at 6-10 seconds (goes up to 25sec) for some not-so-very-realistic but fun sounding stuff. This is what it does best IMHO.

On the right we have some basic tone shaping: LF damp controls the cutoff for low frequency damping and HF cutoff does the same for high frequencies. For high frequencies one can additionally control their decay rate with HF decay.

The low frequency damping is fixed (reverb time dependent), because the sweet spot really didn't seem too wide and I wanted to stay with "sorta-kinda-natural" reverbs. The main thing is to control "mud" without filtering out all the low frequencies that are kinda important for sense of space.

For high frequencies the damping is independent of reverb time (well, naturally they still decay together with everything else too) and the decay time control works as a sort of air absorption control allowing one to change the "temperature" of the reverb.

Note that if you set the two damping frequencies close to each other the actual reverb time will not be as long as the reverb time control would indicate. Also for very short reverbs the effect of damping is subtle (this is by design).

Finally we have output level control, plus mode switch between insert (mix with dry) and send (wet only).

Now, I figured I'd have to approximately tripple the complexity of the interface to fit a half-decent internal EQ, so instead you are encouraged to stick an external EQ on the send track for further tonal control.

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Cool, I'll test it later on. YUP
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Oh and with those with vintage computers: yeah it requires your CPU to support SSE2.

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Glad to see another plugin from you, will test this asap!

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Froze Hermann Seib's Vsthost, but worked in Savihost as far as I can tell.

I'm running it now in Wavosaur(it wasn't the SSE thing, this computer is modern). Sounds really, really good! I see there's no actual wet/dry, but a toggle insert/send.
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RunBeerRun wrote:Froze Hermann Seib's Vsthost, but worked in Savihost as far as I can tell.
Will investigate in a minute.
Sounds really, really good! I see there's no actual wet/dry, but a toggle insert/send.
Yeah well, this is the kind of design decision that will probably divide people (it's the same design in Tila2 as well).

The rationale is that most of the time you will want to use it as a send effect anyway, and rest of the time you just want to save the trouble of setting up a separate send-track (insert mode). If this is your way of thinking, then I think that having a clickable mode is really the best workflow.

I'm sorry if it's not ideal for you workflow. However the output level goes pretty high, so in many cases you can get wet-heavy mix simply by raising the output (in insert mode) and then lowering the track fader.

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RunBeerRun wrote:Froze Hermann Seib's Vsthost, but worked in Savihost as far as I can tell.
Hmmh, I downloaded the latest version of VSTHost and it worked perfectly fine for me (also the double precision version). I'm afraid I'm going to need more details on this (VSTHost version, operating system, etc) if I'm to figure out what is wrong here.

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I'm using an older version of VSTHost, 1.44, Windows 7. I had tried a new one and found it more time-consuming as before, you could just drop stuff in and connect quicker.
The only site for experimental amp sim freeware & MIDI FX: http://runbeerrun.blogspot.com
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Just gave this a quick test run in Bidule... very nice!
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mystran wrote: Try modulation at 60-70% and reverb time at 6-10 seconds (goes up to 25sec) for some not-so-very-realistic but fun sounding stuff. This is what it does best IMHO.
i generally eschew modulation, there does seem to be a sweet spot on the mod pot where it's not as overt. some styles/signals could make good use of it, eg. animated ambient.
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Hey, this is nice! Works well for smaller hall sounds too. Thanks! 8)
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Updated to 1.0.1 -- identical in every way except I filled the factory bank with some not-so-terribly creative presets.

edit: another quick revision 1.0.2: added "load defaults" (reloads saved user defaults if any) and "load factory defaults" menu options (click the signal dust logo)

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Thanks, Mystran, i like your plugins so i will try this one too :)

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The reverb sounds really nice. I think it would benefit from more controls though such as a Hi- and Lo-cut, last in chain before the output, to have a better control over the reverb sound itself, long or short.
As it is now there is always some high 'escaping' through even when HF cutoff and decay are at the lowest possible position. By design? It narrows the sound possibilities for the reverb.

Anyway if you want to keep Abstract Chamber very simple i hope you can at least add those two. If not then maybe for a future Abstract Advanced Chamber. ;)

I played with it on drums and synth chords, nice job Mystran.

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zeep wrote:The reverb sounds really nice. I think it would benefit from more controls though such as a Hi- and Lo-cut, last in chain before the output, to have a better control over the reverb sound itself, long or short.
As it is now there is always some high 'escaping' through even when HF cutoff and decay are at the lowest possible position. By design? It narrows the sound possibilities for the reverb.
You could say it's by design. There are actually both low and high cut filters already but those are fixed at 40Hz and 16kHz respectively (to cleanup rumble and to slightly soften the very high frequencies). I did have then variable in earlier prototypes, but left them out from the final to keep things simple. The main goal for this particular plugin was to keep things as simple as possible so one could dial in a "sensible" reverb fast without having to think of too many variables.

So I decided that I'll leave EQ for external plugins. IMHO at least high/low-shelves and a band or two of peaking EQs would have to be there as well if we were to avoid such external EQ in the average mixing situation. If I added that much I should also have added tons of other stuff (early/late, size, diffusion controls, etc) and there goes simplicity. ;)
Anyway if you want to keep Abstract Chamber very simple i hope you can at least add those two. If not then maybe for a future Abstract Advanced Chamber. ;)
Yeah well, the simplicity is really a lie: there'd be plenty more that could be user adjustable if it wasn't for the design goal. But don't worry, I do have plans of making a much more complex reverb plugin in the future after finishing a few other plugins (at least a compressor is coming really soon now).

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