Verberate feature suggestions

[Chandlerhimself]

I really love this reverb and I remember about a month ago you talked about adding a separate eq to the early reflections section. I think this is a great idea and I hope you follow through with it. However I have another feature request. It would be nice to have a psychoacoustic effect added to the dry signal. To be more specific I would like a knob that pushed the dry sound backwards in the sound field by cutting the highend/low end and narrowing the stereo field. Check out "proximity", a free plugin by Tokyo dawn, which does this. This would allow people to add Verberate as an insert on a track or bus and really set things where they want depth wise in 1 plugin.
Often times for orchestral music you need the woodwinds/strings in the front, the brass in the back and the percussion even farther back. Often times now many samples are recorded dry, so you have to work to get everything in the right place and you usually need to use more than reverb. Adding a psychoacoustic effect would allow people to do this easily.

Also I would be nice to have a low cpu mode to save processing power while mixing and then allow people to switch it to HQ mode when bouncing.

Anyway, thanks for the beautiful reverb.

[stian]

I really love this reverb and I remember about a month ago you talked about adding a separate eq to the early reflections section. I think this is a great idea and I hope you follow through with it. However I have another feature request. It would be nice to have a psychoacoustic effect added to the dry signal. To be more specific I would like a knob that pushed the dry sound backwards in the sound field by cutting the highend/low end and narrowing the stereo field. Check out "proximity", a free plugin by Tokyo dawn, which does this. This would allow people to add Verberate as an insert on a track or bus and really set things where they want depth wise in 1 plugin.
Often times for orchestral music you need the woodwinds/strings in the front, the brass in the back and the percussion even farther back. Often times now many samples are recorded dry, so you have to work to get everything in the right place and you usually need to use more than reverb. Adding a psychoacoustic effect would allow people to do this easily.

Also I would be nice to have a low cpu mode to save processing power while mixing and then allow people to switch it to HQ mode when bouncing.

Anyway, thanks for the beautiful reverb.

Thanks to you for the kind words and your suggestions! The separate EQ section for the earlies will definitely come. We have received several requests for a distance control and we're evaluating different solutions. I'll check out the Proximity effect -- thanks for the tip!

Best,
Stian

[Chandlerhimself]

I'm glad to hear you've decided to make a separate ER EQ. That sounds like a great addition. Here are a few video about proximity

This shows how it sounds, but honestly it's better to just DL it and try it yourself. The air absorption function is the most useful and it's what I'd like added to verberate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l8HWKB7ghg

This shows you how it works. The early reflections section and true gain aren't really needed in verberate, but the air absorption, stereo width and proximity effect are very useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1dAYJb_0ZM

[stian]

I'm glad to hear you've decided to make a separate ER EQ. That sounds like a great addition. Here are a few video about proximity

This shows how it sounds, but honestly it's better to just DL it and try it yourself. The air absorption function is the most useful and it's what I'd like added to verberate.

Thanks for the videos! I've downloaded Proximity and played with it. I was originally thinking about the adjusting the early reflections according to the distance from the source. The filtering in Proximity should be quite easy to reproduce with the post EQ in Verberate. A distance parameter that affects both early reflections and the filtering would be some sort of "meta" parameter since would control several other parameters as well. I'm not sure how easy that would be to understand...

Best,
Stian

[Chandlerhimself]

Thanks for responding. I've been thinking of a few more things I. The past month or so.

Are there any plans to add more tail(late reflection) algorithms? I like the one you have now a lot, but it would be nice to have others too. A little variety never hurt anyone. As I understand it the current tail is based on an impulse response. It would be nice to have a few more based on other IRs.

On a related note, would it be possible to add a low CPU tail algorithm? I noticed in in Image-line's stand alone host that Verberate is using about 10-12% of my CPU. That's not too bad, but when I switched off the tail it only used about 2-3%. Of course in my DAW the amount would be slightly less, but I'd like to use 4-6 instances in an orchestral project. With that many I'm sure it will use between 30-40% of my CPU. I'd like a low CPU tail I could use for general mixing and then switch to the normal tail when I'm ready to bounce down to a wav.

One last thing, does the room size effect the ER length, density or both? If it doesn't effect the length, could you add a control for that?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

[stian]

Are there any plans to add more tail(late reflection) algorithms? I like the one you have now a lot, but it would be nice to have others too. A little variety never hurt anyone. As I understand it the current tail is based on an impulse response. It would be nice to have a few more based on other IRs.

First of all, thanks for your valuable input! Verberate is completely algorithmic, so there are actually no IRs from real room measurements involved. We show the impulse response measurement of a specific setting in Verberate on our web site, though, so I guess that caused the confusion. Some additional parameters to control the late reverberation are planned, such as bloom (or attack) time and possibly one or two controls that affect energy fluctuations in the stereo field.

On a related note, would it be possible to add a low CPU tail algorithm? I noticed in in Image-line's stand alone host that Verberate is using about 10-12% of my CPU. That's not too bad, but when I switched off the tail it only used about 2-3%. Of course in my DAW the amount would be slightly less, but I'd like to use 4-6 instances in an orchestral project. With that many I'm sure it will use between 30-40% of my CPU. I'd like a low CPU tail I could use for general mixing and then switch to the normal tail when I'm ready to bounce down to a wav.

Verberate is in fact heavily optimized and I'm not sure how much more efficiency we can achieve. I'm not to fond of the idea to reduce the quality since the performance boost would probably not justify the quality reduction. The CPU usage depends largely on the block size, so if you can change the audio buffer size in your host, it's recommendable to use a power of two such as 512 or 1024. If we find ways to optimize further, it will definitely have priority, though.

One last thing, does the room size effect the ER length, density or both? If it doesn't effect the length, could you add a control for that?

The room size affects the ER length and to some extent the density (the latter is a matter of how you define density).

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Thanks to you!

Best,
Stian

[plexuss]

Verberate is a really nice reverb. One thing that would be super great is a way to control the envelope of the tail. this way the tail could be adjusted to sit in the mix better. a little window with an interactive interface that allows the drawing of the envelope would be great. and it might be nice to have a knob that applies a + or - time offset to the envelope depending on the amplitude of the input level. a kind of dynamic envelope control to further expand the ability to mix Verberate into the track more naturally.

[zyzygis]

One thing I would like is to have the predelay early reflections syncable to host tempo. In fact it would be cool if the tail could have a syncable envelope option too. The display could have a beats/bars option that the envelope could snap to. That would be pretty unique as far as I know.

[Chandlerhimself]

I think the fade control is already coming which is good. Full envelop control would be nice, but I think it would be enough to have control over the decay shape. Verberate sounds very transparent, which is good, but often times it gets lost in the mix unless it's cranked up. I'd like a control that changes the exponential decay into an inverse exponential decay. At 50% it would be linear and at 100% It could be used as gated delay.

I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but for me it would be better to have a ER/Late ratio slider instead of separate levels. The reason I think this is better is because you can adjust the amount of each without having to worry about volume differences and it would make the lock parameter more useful. As it is now, if you lock the volume the dry signal and the late reverb move together, but the ERs don't. This throws everything out of balance. If you replaced this with Dry, Wet and ER/Late controls, this wouldn't be a problem. Maybe someone else has a reason not to change this, but I think this would be better and easier to use.

I also agree that having pre-delay in sync with the host would be nice. Of course this isn't how real reverb works, but it sounds good. This might create problems with tempo changes, so perhaps something that just reads the current tempo and gives you ms options would be better than continuously changing.

[Michael L]

This is an outstanding thread. Love the ER envelope idea.
Tail suggestion: ability to edit the tail waveform, perhaps like cableguys?

[stian]

Thanks for all the good suggestions, that's much appreciated! As I have mentioned before, there will definitely be a control for the attack or "bloom" time. Unfortunately, Verberate cannot offer a full-blown decay editor with freely adjustable curve points due to its algorithmic nature. A graphical representation of the parameters is a nice idea, though, and I'll consider that (maybe tabs in the decay editor to choose between frequency parameters and time related parameters with corresponding graphs).

I think the ER / late mix control would be a matter of personal taste, and it seems as the users is divided into to equally large groups... For that reason, I've thought about a link button between the late reverb and ER level. When enabled, the late reverb level decreases when you increase the ER level and visa versa. Hopefully, that would satisfy both groups...

Regarding the BPM sync option, would it make sense to have a toggle so that you can choose to display durations as time or in terms of beats?

Best,
Stian

[Chandlerhimself]

Thanks for all the good suggestions, that's much appreciated! As I have mentioned before, there will definitely be a control for the attack or "bloom" time. Unfortunately, Verberate cannot offer a full-blown decay editor with freely adjustable curve points due to its algorithmic nature. A graphical representation of the parameters is a nice idea, though, and I'll consider that (maybe tabs in the decay editor to choose between frequency parameters and time related parameters with corresponding graphs).

I think the ER / late mix control would be a matter of personal taste, and it seems as the users is divided into to equally large groups... For that reason, I've thought about a link button between the late reverb and ER level. When enabled, the late reverb level decreases when you increase the ER level and visa versa. Hopefully, that would satisfy both groups...

Regarding the BPM sync option, would it make sense to have a toggle so that you can choose to display durations as time or in terms of beats?

Best,
Stian

All I need is a way to increase the decay level without increasing the time. I don't really need something graphical, but it would be cool. The ER mix control link button is a good idea. It's good enough for me. A lock option would be nice for when you change patches too. I beleive now it only works for the dry/tail levels, but not the ER level.

I think it makes more sense to have a time based BPM sync. The reason I say this is, most people know a 120 ms predelay will sound like detached from the source, but if it's just 16th notes it's hard to know until you listen. Also unless you do extremely small note durations it might be hard to get the right number. I think it would be good to have it BPM synced with times, but only show times between 1ms-250ms. Also when you turn off the sync it stays on the same time, so you can sync to get the right times and then un-sync to put it a little behind or ahead of the beat.

The proposed enhancements sound great. Stereo field energy control sounds great. Verberate sounds great already, but have the great clean sound of an IR, but with even more flexibility will be great.

[zyzygis]

Yes, I think the toggle for bpm display is a good idea. I would like to be able to sync the reverb envelope as well as the predelay for special effects like gated reverse type reverbs on percussive sounds or vocals.

[bundoo]

Any chance mono to stereo will happen?

[stian]

Any chance mono to stereo will happen?

Which host are you using? Mono to stereo already works with Pro Tools.

Best,
Stian