Pieces made in Maria Strassengel

[PaoloT]

Hi,

There is only an official demo for the Maria Strassengel ambience, and it is a very extreme one. I like it (and the piece) very much, but would like to listen to some more musical situations with it.

The church is very often used for the musical life of Graz. In general, it looks like a gothic church should be and sound. It has that magic floral shape that makes the stone look a lot like something organic. While I'm more accustomed to romanesque churches with no bays on the roof (the typical architecture of my area), it's the kind of church environment I should feel more connaturate to me, belonging more or less to the same age, and conceived more or less for the same music.

Then, the late gothic shape of Strassengel is quite familiar to me, looking so similar to the main apse (the "German chapel") of the Basilica di Loreto. I don't know if they sound really similar, since Loreto has a huge (and hugely resonant) chatedral on the open side, but the roof has two bays past the apse, and this is where the typical gothic church sound develops.

So, I would be happy if someone can identify other demos (or post other pieces) placed in that little church. I'll listen them with a great curiosity. And comparison with the sound of Pernegg would be very interesting.

Paolo

[Dietz]

https://forum.vsl.co.at/topic/39174/How To Test Drive Vienna MIR PRO MIR PRO 24 With A Free Demo License/235602

[PaoloT]

Hi Dietz,

Thank you very much for pointing me toward the demo! But I must admit that I already have and use RoomPack 3, but was curious to hear how others, more skilled than me, have used it. It's incredible how this type of space can produce different results with different types of music (a concert hall seems to be much more predictable than a church).

Paolo

[Dietz]

Hmmm, I see. 😊

Right now I don't know about dedicated demos, but I _do_ know 😊 that I did several mixes using Pernegg (which is maybe the most accomplished MIR Venue of all, apart from Synchron Stage). I don't know if they are of any interest for you, though, as the actual results depend a lot on the production and the type of music.

-> All of Manfred Plessl's score for "Life Guidance" relies on Pernegg (in some kind of 3D setup, using the microphone position 4 from the choir's balcony for an additional height-layer). The trailer in the link uses parts of the original score.

-> All pieces of JBBG's most recent masterpiece "True Stories" were mixed in MIR Pro, some of them using Pernegg for the less "groovy" bigband pieces (most notably the opener "Ouverture").

... but I have high hopes that fellow forum members will chime in with more telling and "pure" examples and comparisons.

Kind regards,

[Francesco Pirrone]

Hi there, I use Maria Strassengel a lot and I love it! The thing is that I use the IR from Vienna Suite rather than the MIR PRO pack. :-( I've recently started a discussion about that. All the best Francesco

[PaoloT]

Dietz, thank you very much! This is testament at how versatile this software is! If I understand correctly, Pernegg is more a modern space than a middle-age or a baroque one. The recent restructuring should have also changed its acoustics. This should explain why it is so transparent and bright, despite the height of the nave.

Francesco, I've found your Canon (beautiful piece!). So you are using MIR's reverbs in a traditional way, as if it was an "ordinary" convolution reverb. The sound of your mix is very open, more than I seem to be able to achieve with my test mixes. But probably the trick, working in MIR, is to make the reverb a bit more dry, and emphasize the first Mic pair.

Paolo

[PaoloT]

Dietz,

@Dietz said:

Pernegg (which is maybe the most accomplished MIR Venue of all, apart from Synchron Stage).

I see Pernegg has more than double the impulses compared to Maria Strassengel, despite being the same number of ambience sample (0° and 180° in both cases). Does this translate in a "higher resolution" of the resulting reverb?

Paolo

[Dietz]

@PaoloT said:

Dietz, thank you very much! This is testament at how versatile this software is! If I understand correctly, Pernegg is more a modern space than a middle-age or a baroque one. The recent restructuring should have also changed its acoustics. This should explain why it is so transparent and bright, despite the height of the nave. [...]

Strassengel chapel has been founded (but not finished) in the first half of the 14th century indeed, maybe as early as 1331, but it was constantly re-built and enhanced during centuries to come. But the construction of the monstery church in Pernegg startet in the late 15th, early 16th century already, again with constant changes and enhancements taking place until the 18th century.

... you find more historical and architectural details in MIR's RoomPack manuals:

-> http://eu.vsl.co.at/downloader.aspx?FileID=67338

 

-> http://eu.vsl.co.at/downloader.aspx?FileID=20281

HTH!

[Dietz]

@Dietz said:

Pernegg (which is maybe the most accomplished MIR Venue of all, apart from Synchron Stage).

I see Pernegg has more than double the impulses compared to Maria Strassengel, despite being the same number of ambience sample (0° and 180° in both cases). Does this translate in a "higher resolution" of the resulting reverb?

Paolo

It translates in "more IR positions", which one shouldn't mistake as "higher resolution". 😊 Strassengel church is considerably smaller than the chapel of Strassengel, thus the smaller number of IRs. But I concede that Strassengel was _extremly_ hard to sample due to its exposure to environmental noise of all kinds, therefore we had to content ourselves with fewer IR-positions than we could capture during the recording sessions in Pernegg, in (more or less) perfect silence.

[PaoloT]

Dietz, very informative indeed! I had missed the historical part of the manual. It is very complete, and an indispensable guide to understand how that space was conceived, and how its acoustics will react to certain types of music.

Paolo

[PaoloT]

By reading something about the acoustics of the romanesque, gothic and baroque churches in Meyer's "Acoustics and the Performance of Music" book, I might understand the difference between Maria Strassengel and Pernegg a bit better.

Due to the abundance of wooden structures, rised floating floors and galleries, baroque churches tend to be more reverberant in the middle frequencies, while the older churches had stronger bass frequencies reverberation. Pillars also create additional reflections.

This means that baroque churches, with their reduces bass and emphasized middle frequencies, are more transparent, due to the increased intellegibility of the open vowels (ah, oh) and the reduced masking of bass voices. Polyphonic music, predominant at the age of their building, is better perceived in baroque churches. The brighter color of walls also helps in receiving an idea of brightness and transparency.

Pernegg already relies on a baroque design, and was originally built during the golden age of polyphony. Its designers may have had a clear acoustic idea in mind.

So, I would say: solo instruments and voices, or music demanding for denser and darker reverberation, seem to be better placed in Maria Strassengel; polyphonic and transparent music should live better in Pernegg.

Paolo

[Francesco Pirrone]

@PaoloT said:

Francesco, I've found your Canon (beautiful piece!). So you are using MIR's reverbs in a traditional way, as if it was an "ordinary" convolution reverb. The sound of your mix is very open, more than I seem to be able to achieve with my test mixes. But probably the trick, working in MIR, is to make the reverb a bit more dry, and emphasize the first Mic pair.

Paolo

Thanks Paolo, I am glad you liked it. 😊

Vienna Suite features a classical Convolution Reverb, and there are four different IRs for Maria Strassengel, I would assume they have redone everything from scratch when recreating Maria Strassengel in MIR but I would also expect to find some similarities within the overall acoustic features, if that makes sense?

All I know is that I love the sound of this church, many times I've tried to mix my tracks in Grosser Saal or Teldex and then I ended up using Maria Strassengel instead (e.g. Remembrance, Music Box, Dark Castle, Halloween Madness, Hellish Lullaby, 😉. I can understand that you are after classical renditions rather than soundtracks, funny enough I think this IR gives my strings more of a Hollywood sound, I really like the high end.

Cheers

Francesco

[William]

Very interesting info on these - really agree on the sound of both. I have started using Pernegg as almost a default it is so rich sounding but clear.