Recreating "specific" spaces with reverb.

[KarmanHardon]

Hey!

So.

My old yamaha 80's reverb box died so I went out and bought what seemed would fill in nicely for the littlte money I limited myself to spend: a Behringer Rev2496. That thing not only does the gated reverbs and slapback stuff I did with my previous box perfectly, it's capable of producing very convincing spaces... good enough that you get a mental picture of the actual space.

The wealth of parameters and the brilliant way they are accessed/laid out make me want to approach reverb programming a different way. Instead of "tweaking until it sounds nice and appropriate", I'd like to be able to recreate rooms I imagine in my head... or that I've been in. I'd like to acquire the intellectual tools to be able to know in advance what decay times to enter, how to set the early reflections properly etc to quickly get as close as possible to, say, how my previous rehearsing space sounded like or my living room.

So I'm looking for something to read about just that... or charts that roughly show what decay times correspond to given room dimensions, how different materials damps some frequencies... When I listen to records, I find that sometimes a very obvious but well chosen echo/reverb on a certain element will give such a clear mental image of a certain space that it ends up contributing a whole lot to overall vibe of the song. It puts me, as the listener, in that very room. I can tell if it's dark or bright in there... if it's cold or warm...

Any particular documents, tutorials suggestion would be appreciated.

[kkissinger]

http://www.voxengo.com/group/convolution/

We learned about this at the Kansas City Regional electro-music festival.

Convolution enables you to recreate the response of specific spaces and Voxengo has software that allows you to create your own spaces (the impulse modeler).

I haven't yet purchased any of this software however it is on my "wish list" for future exploration.

[nerdware]

I've used the convolve opcode in Csound. It can do a lot more than just reverb. You can certainly use it to create a model of a real room, but I like it more for the odd things like blending one sound with another. Maybe I just don't have any good rooms to model.

Very tasty, but nothing like a standard reverb effect with controls for things like room size, damping, etc. I use Freeverb for that. I've not used Freeverb3, but it does the whole impulse thing and then some. There's even a VST plugin for it.

[dubbhism]

i think you could read a bit about acoustics in general. that will probably help. there are not a lot of good books on acoustics available, maybe you'd like

'spaces speak, eare you listening?' MIT Press or the
'Master handbook of Acoustics'

but probably it's just as useful to read lots of articles about acoustics in magazines like Sound on Sound

[jksuperstar]

If the space exists, I'd recommend getting a little training device for dogs/animals (it's a piece of metal that clicks loudly when pressed, and serves as a good impluse generator, I've seen it called a dog clicker). If possible, record the impulse and the response from the room. This could be used in a convolution engine as described above, or you can look at it visually, and see --

What is the initial delay from the impulse to the 1st reflection?
How quickly do the reflections build up?
How long do they last?
..and how do they trail off (what shape..linear, log, or some other envelope)?

Those, I think are the parameters you're looking for. Maybe if you do that a few times, even in your bathroom or kitchen or garage, you'll get some experience with how the parameters available to you can be mapped into a room.

Then you can start designing rooms in your head?

[Winterbound]

Another great piece of software is (Reverberate) The best Convolution Reverb I have used in recent years. It has found its way into my permanent gear list - Really bright and lively... Great stuff... Check link below.

http://www.liquidsonics.com/software_reverberate.htm


Hope this helps you out..



Darren.

[abstraktor]

Hi, thought I'd add to this topic.....
Logic Pro comes with a convolution reverb plug-in called Space Designer. It can extract the model from a wav file dropped on to it which works ok (isolating a reverb tail works better).
Fortunately it also comes with the Impulse response Utility which can accurately capture the acoustic properties of real spaces (with a stereo mic pair and audio interface of course). Some of my students tested it on a corridor in the college building and the results were really convincing.
I'm sure you could also capture hardware reverb units responses easily.