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On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Michael Peters <mp@mpeters.de> wrote: > sometimes I love to listen to the dreamy music of Harold Budd, or Robin > Guthrie (Cocteau Twins). Their pianos and guitars are often drenched in >a > very long and dense reverb that would put the Taj Mahal to shame - this > reverb has a depth, richness, and aliveness that is lovely to listen >to, it > is not the linear, cold, and boring reverb that comes out of my >Nanoverb. > How do they achieve that? it often doesn't sound as if they would >simply use > echo or chorus to fatten the sound, it often seems to be nothing but >reverb. > Is it just a matter of using one expensive reverb unit? Are there reverb > units which can create such a sound out of the box? > > I've put a Robin Guthrie sample here as an example: > http://www.veloopity.de/temp/guthrie.mp3 > > Michael www.michaelpeters.de There's a fair chance the effect you're after is what often is referred to as "freeze reverb". First time I heard it was at a Joh Hassell concert in 1983. It sounds amazing! It might be appropriate to also describe it as "a reverb loop". It can be achieved in many ways. Last year I had a TC Electronics FirworX and I set it up lined up with an Input Envelope Follow module. I set the Envelope Follow Module was set to modulate the effect's feedback in a way that feedback was always 100 percent when I wasn't playing any audio input. But as soon as I made a noise into the mic the feedback was lowered, by the Envelope Follow Module on the input, to create a "pocket" in the layered "frozen" sound to fit in the latest audio input. Unfortunately I couldn't make it work with TC's reverb, but I reached a quite useful patch by doing it with a reverb-like multi tap delay. If you have a chance to play around with Ableton Live you have to check out the reverb pre-set named "Freezeverb". It woks like my FireworX patch described above, but with a pure reverb. The reverb sound is thin, but that is good starters since you can work on it (chorus the reverb sound or make it multi band to add differently "rhythmatized" tremolo to different frequency bands of the reverb's return signal. If you work with Bidule or Max you can set up an Input Envelope Follow process to target just about any other process, preferably "feedback" in a reverb loop. If you do that, it might be a good idea to either use pre-delay in the reverb patch or include a short delay in the effect chain, just to prevent acoustic feedback to happen. I tried that with Sir convolution reverb plug-in, but found it too CPU consuming on all laptop systems I have yet had access to. The multi processor support in Bidule is still not working properly, but when that happens I will go back to that project. For Windows there is a multi effect VST plug-in, named Ronin, that has a built-in Input Envelop Follower function so I stick to that so far. A third technique is what we hear in the Robin Guthrie example: Not sending everything into the reverb loop. If you listen to the clip it is obvious that Robin only sends the first eighth note (or maybe a little longer slice) into the reverb. Since it is a FreezVerb functionality (as described above) this short snippet "spreads out" to sound more like a trembling pad than the guitar string sound he fed it with. David Gilmour, of the Pink Floyd, is also known for having done this trick at live concerts. You can set up a momentary button pedal to send whatever noise you are making into the reverb loop. Hmm... maybe the plug-in River Run also should be mentioned here. It can only be bought as part of the Nautilus bundle from Audio Ease. It's not a reverb but more like a "granular looper" that picks one slice of the audio input and stretches it out in time. But the cool thing is that the window for picking the slice is also moving along the input signal. I first heard it in the American television show Supernatural, before knowing how this effect was produced, but then I saw soundtrack composer Steve Tavaglione talk about it and demonstrating it in a video interview. Steve uses the version of the plug-in that comes as part of the Digital Performer DAW software, but I think it's the same as the Nautilus bundle version (which is the one I have). River Run only runs on OS X. When talking OS X there are also some interesting granular audio freezing plug-ins available for free from the composer Michael Norris called Soundmagic Spectral. http://www.michaelnorris.info/soundmagicspectral/. For any Harold Budd fans this is a must-have :-) -- Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international)