What are your favorite non-Valhalla reverbs, and why?

[Bronto Scorpio]

I love the reverb on the early Autechre records

Cheers
Dennis

[valhallasound]

I love the reverb on the early Autechre records

Cheers
Dennis

ALESIS. Midiverb II, or Quadraverb. Lots of Warp artists heavily relied on the Alesis reverbs, as did other electronic/ambient artists of the 1990's.

Sean Costello

[Kriminal]

Hi all,

I spend a lot of time thinking about the "how" of reverbs. Tonight, I am more interested in the "what" and "why." Specifically:

- What are your favorite reverbs?
- And, why are those your favorite reverbs? What is it about the sound of those reverbs, or the experience of those reverbs, that makes them your favorites?

A few suggested ground rules for the discussion:

- The reverb can be ANY reverb possible. Plugin, hardware, physical space, a dream, a memory, a favorite song, a reverb that doesn't exist yet. Think big. You don't have to own it, or have owned it, but you need to have experienced it.

- No Valhalla DSP reverbs, please. I would like this to be a marketing/spin free zone, and am thus removing my plugins from this discussion. I want to keep the discussion about the WHY of reverbs, as opposed to discussions of one brand versus another.

- One anecdote per post. You can post as many reverb experiences as you like, but I would ask that you separate your experiences into different posts. Think of this as "small plates." This is a tapas/izakaya thread, with the goal to make each post easily digestible, leaving room for more.

- No debating. This is about YOUR favorite reverb experiences. No one can take away YOUR reverb experience. It is YOURS.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and comments!

Sean Costello

a very strange request..or is it....seems like a not so devious plan to find the most popular and make something similar perhaps...

[Resonator63]

Not really a reverb, I guess, but similar...
I love the sympathetic vibrations of an acoustic piano with the damper pedal pushed down.

Have you tried PSP Pianoverb? It's free

http://www.kvraudio.com/product/507

[antithesist]

Treeverb!

Who has Matlab or a clone that can bust us out an IR?

I tried getting one of them, maybe Scilab, to do some audio awhile back and fell* flat on my face.

*fell/tree... get it?

[valhallasound]

Treeverb!

Who has Matlab or a clone that can bust us out an IR?

I tried getting one of them, maybe Scilab, to do some audio awhile back and fell* flat on my face.

*fell/tree... get it?

I've got MATLAB, but I suck at using it. I need to get familiar with it again to design some filters for the next product, but I'm a dreadin' it.

Sean Costello

[Dozius]

Treeverb!

Who has Matlab or a clone that can bust us out an IR?

I tried getting one of them, maybe Scilab, to do some audio awhile back and fell* flat on my face.

*fell/tree... get it?

You could likely run the script in Octave a GNU clone of matlab.

If I had matlab at home I would turn this into a stand alone executable. Unfortunately I only have access to matlab at work.

[Sequent]

+1

That is a fantastic reverb. It's too bad that Spin Audio went under, but M2 still works wonderfully.

SpinAudio Roomverb M1 and M2:

- very large set of room variables to tweak (with M2 being the absolute king in this regard: room dimensions, mic placement, wall material, decay curve etc. etc.) which makes it possible to ghet the sound you are looking for if you know what you do. Downside: you really have to know what you do since the presets are imo rather weak.
- serarate eq for early and late reflextions
- M2: brilliant preset management with search

[Sequent]

Yes, but it would have been a great hall for ambient music concerts. Like Steve Roach, Robert, Rich, etc.

Bad reverb: Any concert heard at the Kingdome, which was the old multipurpose stadium in Seattle from 1976 to 2000 (I forget the exact dates of building and destruction). That building had about a 20 second reverb time. Hearing Eddie Van Halen doing "Eruption" in that building produced a hilarious smear of undifferentiated note energy, as about 200 Tinkerbell guitar notes at a time would be blended into a single sound.

Sean Costello

[Sequent]

The church that we went to when I was growing up. It was a fairly big space (ten stories tall) with a big dome. The reverb in there was fantastic... almost too much. But I loved it. The pipe organ in there sounded HUGE and I have always been disappointed by the ambience in most other local churches I have been too since.

[Fritze]

QE2 by Mike Oldfield was one of my first concious reverb experiences.

I think that was the first Quantec back then.

Wonderful music btw...

[Brittlestem]

QE2 by Mike Oldfield was one of my first concious reverb experiences.

I think that was the first Quantec back then.

Wonderful music btw...

"Celt" is stunning, the percussion is incredible. Love "Sheba" too, it was the first time I'd heard a vocoder!

[valhallasound]

a very strange request..or is it....seems like a not so devious plan to find the most popular and make something similar perhaps...

I can figure out what is popular pretty easily. Any thread that has "vs" in the title is probably a good start. I am more interested in other forms of what and why:

- Why do people like certain plugins or hardware?
- What characteristics of a reverb do people find important?
- What moves people about reverb? Why do we care about this?

I think I am trying to figure out my own "why," as in: why have I spent so much of my time studying and coding reverbs? Granted, it is my job nowadays, but there was a long period of time where it wasn't my job per se, yet I was still reading every reverb paper I could get my hands on, and coding reverbs in my spare time.

Hearing about other people's what/why experiences helps me to step outside of my own little world, and the world of x vs y forum threads. The goal is to put reverbs into a wider context, and why they are important to us for music, and why a sense of space translates into something significant for so many people.

Sean Costello

[antithesist]

Why? You're obsessed. Just accept it. I can think of a lot worse things. As was touched on here or elsewhere, reverberation and echo are primal. They give the sound maker informative and entertaining feedback in addition to direct sound. They can give the non-source listener spacial and temporal cues that can critical for the very survival of an animal. Plus, they're cool.

One of my first strong recollections about the abstract concept of reverb was when I heard an older youth talking about Switched-On Bach. I came up in mid-conversation and this guy was going on and on about some device Carlos used to make sounds stretch out into infinity.

I don't think he really knew what he was talking about, but I and others sure thought he did. The concept stuck in my mind though. I'm guessing maybe he/she used an EMT plate, but I really think the guy might have also been confusing liner notes about the Moog modular's envelope generators and VCA's. It didn't matter, because since then I've obsessed with making sounds stretch out into infinity. I can think of a lot worse things.

[Andrew Souter]

+1

That is a fantastic reverb. It's too bad that Spin Audio went under, but M2 still works wonderfully.

SpinAudio Roomverb M1 and M2:

- very large set of room variables to tweak (with M2 being the absolute king in this regard: room dimensions, mic placement, wall material, decay curve etc. etc.) which makes it possible to ghet the sound you are looking for if you know what you do. Downside: you really have to know what you do since the presets are imo rather weak.
- serarate eq for early and late reflextions
- M2: brilliant preset management with search

Thanks. Denis, (half of 2CAudio) was formerly half of Spin Audio, and is the main designer of M2 and all other Spin Audio reverbs. Not sure exactly how widely known that is...

Anyway, we have some exciting stuff for you all quite soon...

Back to work now.