MIR PRO Character Presets

[Jan1981]

Hi,

I have a question regarding the MIR PRO character presets especially the MIRx-Presets. What kind of processing are you using there and is there any documentation on this subject (e.g. EQ settings etc.)?

Greetings, Jan

[Dietz]

Short answer: Character Presets are solely made of hand-crafted EQ- and filter settings, applied to the dry signal component before it hits the convolution engine. (They are simply called “Pre EQ” in MIRx, therefore.)

Long answer (… skip if you’re in a hurry):

Writing a manual always means to weigh between technical completeness and ease of comprehensibleness. Legacy Vienna MIR (MIR Pro’s predecessor) lent itself to the first approach, and consequently there were complaints about the complexity and technicality of the manual. I tried to stick to the second approach when compiling the manual for MIR Pro, separating parts of the engineering background to addendum texts - which of course means to omit some of the more technical aspects. 

For your convenience, the following except from legacy Vienna MIR's manual contains the Character Preset typology I mentioned above:

@Another User said:

Character Presets 

 The fact that MIR "knows" a lot about the instruments on its stages makes it possible to supply very deep and customized ways of handling them. It provides for the seemingly simple but highly efficient way of changing an Instrument's timbre or "character" by applying one of MIR's built-in Character Presets.

Individual, hand-crafted Character Presets are available for every single Vienna Instrument (with the exception of a few less commonly used percussions). Provided that the suitable Instrument Profile was applied, there will be at least five "colors" to choose from just by clicking on the pull-down menu bar.

Common settings are:

• Pure (no Character Preset applied; default) 

• Air 

• Silk / Silver 

• Bite 

• Distant 

• Warm 

HINT: Most of the time, selecting an adequate Character Preset will show that little (if any) other processing is necessary down the line. (...). 

In cases were there are no customized settings for an instrument or if a General Purpose profile is employed, more generalized presets are used. Those presets are marked with additional asterisks (*) after the name.

... it is hard to explain sound in words! So why don't you take a look at the following, generalized examples of how a specific MIR Character Preset will change the sound of an instrument. [… please take a look at the attached screenshots.]

BTW: MIRx-specific Characters (a.k.a. "Pre EQs) are the most elaborate ones, as they are ready-mades for a single Vienna Instrument in a unique position in one specific Venue. It took me literally months to create them. 8-)

[Jan1981]

I absolutly adore these MIRx-Character-Presets. You have done a great job there. I could never do it. The instruments in a venue blend together so well without loosing the touch to the others. And my question was indeed very specific. I would really like to have a look at the EQ-settings of the MIRx-Presets for "Großer Konzertsaal". Is there any way to find this data? I would really appreciate it.

And I have one additional question regarding EQs. Besides the character-presets there are room-EQs for many instruments in MIRPro. What purpose do they serve?

btw.: I have time. You can write texts as long as you wish. I will read them ;-)

[Dietz]

Thanks for your friendly feedback, Jan! Highly appreciated. :-)

There is no easy way to present individual Characters, sorry to say so. The development tools used for their creation aren't accessible with MIR Pro's commercial version. This was a conscious decision as some of these settings might look rather extreme. 8-)

Re: RoomEQ - This EQ is the main tool to sculpt the wet-only part of MIR Pro's output (... opposed to the Character EQ which affects the dry signal component, too). If you need to get rid of certain resonances, brightness, or - quite contrary - the typical "muddiness" of large halls, you will reach for this EQ to tame these issues. Just click on the "E"dit button to open the EQ editor window.

You'll see that there's a bank of 32 settings for the RoomEQ (actually 33, including the "Default"-setting). You can assign one of these settings to each and every Icon on a MIR Venue's stage, typically one for each instrument family. At least that's the way I use this feature for the creation of MIRx- and MIRx-mode-presets. 

HTH,

[PaoloT]

Dietz, please let me reopen this old thread. You described the use of the MIR icon's Character EQ, and the one of the Room EQ in MIR. When using Vienna Ensemble Pro there is another EQ one can apply – Equalizer Pro – coming after any MIR processing. What role would you assign it?

My first impression is that the Character EQ of a MIR's icon is trying to remain as natural as possible. Being applied to the "dry" signal wouldn't affect the reverb directly. On the contrary, I would say that Equalizer Pro is made (when not used for correction in Resonance Menu mode) for a mixing situation, after the instrument has been captured by the microphones.

The EQ in MIR's icon seems to give me back the way in which the player wants to play his/her instrument. Warmer, lighter, more aggressive, with more or less sound – this is how the player plays it.

The Equalizer Pro in a VEP channel is what I would do in post-processing, taking all the creative choices to make the instrument fit with the other instruments.

I don't know if the two steps are really separate, but I find the second one to allow more radical results. If I want to change the character of the natural sound, I go for the MIR icon's EQ. If I want a trumpet to stand out from the ensemble, or a cello ensemble sound fuller and fatter in the mix, I go for Equalizer Pro.

Paolo

[Dietz]

Hi Paolo,

the MIR EQ in VE Pro comes from an day and age when there was no Vienna Suite Pro that came as part of application. It's "just" a very modern, great-sounding and very versatile EQ that's similar to VS Pro's EQ. 

The "Characters" of MIR rely on the same algorithms, more or less. But due to the fact that I created them for specific instruments, but for unknown tasks, they should be indeed very "friendly" to the source. For more drastic changes the MIR EQ (or any of it's siblings) will come handy. 

As long as you keep in mind that MIR's RoomEQ will only affect the wet signal component, you have everything sorted, it seems! :-)

All the best,

[PaoloT]

Thank you for your explanation, Dietz.

I'm comparing the VI+MIR and the SYNCHRON-ized instruments, to see what mixing the former can get from the latter. As far as I can see (and as made clear by Paul), SYzd instruments follow this signal flow:

(1) Samples -> (2) HP filter > (3) EQ > (4) CMP (if any) > (5) Convolution IR > (6) Artificial REV

When working with VI+MIR, I can be reasonably sure that (5) is done in MIR.

In case it is needed, (4) should come before entering MIR.

I don't know about (2); should it be done with a separate EQ, before sending the instrument to MIR? Or is it already included somewhere in MIR?

As for (3), I wonder if it is equivalent to the Character EQ in MIR's instrument channel (acting on the dry signal). The placement in the signal path seems to be the same.

Artificial reverb (6) should be added to the VEP channel individually. I guess an instance of MIRacle would work great (and, as I could see, it sounds the same as the artificial reverb in Synchron Player).

Any additional corrective/creative EQ should, I guess, be added to the VEP channel, after MIR.

Does it make sense?

Paolo

[Dietz]

As far as EQ and (linear) convolution are concerned, it makes no difference wether you do the sound-shaping before or after the convolution took place.

As soon as there are non-linear changes like compression and so on it depends on your aims where to put it. For better "flow" and intelligibility (esp. of solo instruments) a bit of compression on the dry signal might help. For more "glue" between instrument and Venue, it might be advisable to use it on the MIR-ed signal.

The EQ (3) in Synchron Player is much like the Pre-EQ in MIRx, which again is based on MIR Pro's Characters. And while it's not a rule, it's not unusual practice to add a bit of algorithmic reverb to a signal that has been treated with an IR already, to add some "shimmer" and/or a longer tail for nicer "feathering". 

HTH,

[PaoloT]

Dietz, it absolutely helps, thank you!

Paolo