ValhallaRoom 1.5.1 Released. New Electric Blue GUI

[ironflippy]

Why are you only asking $50 for this?

Some reasons:

- Your average DAW has a ton of built in effects for a few hundred bucks. Why should a single high quality effect cost as much or more than your DAW?
- The economy sucks. At least for those of us in the bottom 90%.
- I like Boss pedals, which are cheap.
- I hate the notion of Veblen goods.
- I don't have to support a US Representative in Congress.
- There have been a lot of high quality reverb plugins released in the last few years.
- I want musicians to use this, in addition to studio owners and engineers. Much of the music I love has been recorded at home on modest rigs, and I would love to put high-end tools in the hands of such musicians.
- I want this to be the SM57 of reverb plugins. Low cost, damn near indestructible, versatile, super useful, everyone has one.
- Low overhead. Valhalla DSP is me, with some graphic design assistance from my wife (she helped a ton with the look & feel of Room). My office is my 4yo MacBook Pro.
- I have a LOT of algorithms in me. If I start charging $$$ for a given plugin, that makes things too precious for my tastes.
- Because you DESERVE a kick-ass reverb for $50.

Sean Costello

haha, fair enough!

I'm really glad I held off on buying a nice, all-purpose reverb.

[todd_r]

...ValhallaRoom can certainly get long, dark, washy reverbs, in addition to really small and short ambiances...

BI-WINNING!

[jens]

Count me in on the mass-craze!

[TFF]

Stoked for this. Hurry up already!

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[valhallasound]

Shimmer still has it's uses the more i test the demo, but for that unique weird pitch shift thing it does, it sounds quite trippy.

I was playing audio through both Shimmer and Room last night. They seem quite complementary to me. The Shimmer "Black Hole" preset, with the way the audio fades in and the deep chorusing, is something that Room just can't do. Similarly, the "Concert Hall" in Shimmer sounds like a 224 Concert Hall algorithm with the decay time cranked up, but doesn't sound much like a physical concert hall at all. Meanwhile, Room can easily get realistic physical concert hall sounds - decay around 1.9 to 2 seconds, longer decay time around 500 Hz, considerably high frequency damping, 15 to 30 milliseconds between the initial sound and the start of the early reflections cluster, and so on.

Quick summary: ValhallaRoom is more realistic, ValhallaShimmer is more psychedelic.

Sean

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[valhallasound]

but room can do 5 - 8 second decay times too, right?

ValhallaRoom can get decay times ranging from 0.1 seconds to 100 seconds. In addition, the size of the early energy can be set down to a few milliseconds. It isn't the specific decay times that can't be captured by Room versus Shimmer, but the other qualities: spatial spread, attack and decay shape, modulation, etc. ValhallaRoom can get very long washy chorusy wet spacey tails - they just sound different than the very long washy chorusy wet spacey tails that Shimmer will give you.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[valhallasound]

ok, got it.

i suppose it wouldn;t make sense if they DIDN'T sound different. From what i am hearing of the demos, the room is more my thing, and i can just imagine on those vocals the large chamber with a longer decay and a bit wetter for some hypnotic tarnce. If it maintains that quality of smoothness with longer decays, that's close to lexicon quality. What a bargain.

The LargeChamber algorithm was designed to have the initial high echo density and lack of color of the Lexicon Rich Chamber algorithms, while having far less dependence on the Size parameter for echo density than the Lexicon algorithm. At all settings of Size, the Large Chamber algorithm sounds dense to me. It doesn't have the "character" that the other modes have, as far as any sort of energy patterning - to me, it sounds like pure exponential decay. It kinda freaks me out. The algorithm topology was one of those things that I always thought "nah, that won't work" until I figured out a way to make it work. Very short decays sound like a natural extension of the short signal, while long decays are super smooth.

Even thought the Late energy of the LargeChamber has a very exponential decay, the attack and initial decay can be shaped by sending the Early section into the Late reverb. One of the tricks I figured out yesterday is to set the Early Size to around 100 msec, to create a slight "gated" reverb if listened to on its own, then send this to the Late reverb, and set the Depth slider (which is new, and controls the Early/Late mix) to 100% Late. This creates a "squashed" initial transient, similar to running the reverb through a slight amount of compression, or recording to a hot tape signal. By using the LargeRoom or LargeChamber, and setting the Decay setting to around 0.5 sec, I managed to get a drum sound that sounded fairly close to "Surfer Rosa" to my ears.

Sean Costello

[D.Wako]

Those examples do sound good.

[audiosabre]

Examples sound really good to me. The bright examples are scarily transparent. Eos, Shimmer and Room; I'd say that's a hat-trick of awesome reverb. Hard to beat in terms of flexibility

I have no hesitation supporting developers with Sean's attitude

[jensa]

...I managed to get a drum sound that sounded fairly close to "Surfer Rosa" to my ears.

Not only excellent at reverbs, impeccable taste in music too.

[metalifuxx]

One of the tricks I figured out yesterday is to set the Early Size to around 100 msec, to create a slight "gated" reverb if listened to on its own, then send this to the Late reverb, and set the Depth slider (which is new, and controls the Early/Late mix) to 100% Late. This creates a "squashed" initial transient, similar to running the reverb through a slight amount of compression, or recording to a hot tape signal.

I like creating a hybrid of this trick with two delays in series. I set the first to a short slap back setting with little feedback and short echo so it really catches the initial transient pluck and energy to give it that bounce, and have the wet/dry mixed to about 50/50, and then send this into a longer delay time with higher feedback and wet/dry mix lower and roll off the highs a little. You can get that Radiohead "Planet Telex" sound that sounds like an echo spring reverb ambient tape delay wash but the initial shorter slap back helps keep it present while it decays. Although I think the song is titled that because they used the Fender Tel Ray echo reverb unit, which uses an oil can/drum mechanism to create a hybrid of reverb and echo instead of a motorized tape unit.

[stk]

- I want musicians to use this, in addition to studio owners and engineers. Much of the music I love has been recorded at home on modest rigs, and I would love to put high-end tools in the hands of such musicians.

You, sir, win my custom before I've even demoed this thing