Reverb and monitors

[rediesisminore]

Hello Dietz,

first question - I think - many (future) users would be interested in:

which reverb unit do you use to produce demos and how do you think it suits the samples concerning their placement in the sonic space (by the instrumentists photos it appears no panning information is recorded into the samples themselves and mics are placed at a rather short distance from the instruments) ?

second (and short!):

what are you monitoring on when producing the demos?

Overall maybe we would be interested into the whole configuration used!

Great expectations there about this library which has a very welcome "classical" and "european" character - I'm not interested in music for films!

Waiting for more demos,
continue your great work,

Roberto Rega

[Dietz]

Hi Roberto!

Sorry for the slightly delayed reply - I have to admit that I was a bit overwhelmed by the fact that there is already real-life traffic on the very first day of our site being online 8-] ... congratulations for being our first guest here, and thanks for your kind words.

Back on topic: There isn't "the" typical setup for our demo mixes, as our possibilites as well as our demands are changing as the Vienna Symphonic Library developes. Until know, Herb arranged most of his pieces in GigaStudio in 16bit/48kHz, some inside Sequoia in 32bit float/96kHz (our "production quality"), and exported to 24bit/48kHz track-files, which were imported into a ProTools Mix-system. (Yeah, I know ...)

The monitors in the Silent Stage are Studer A5 in the engineering room, Genelec S30 in the producer-room - the same are installed in our editing suites, BTW. In the master-processing of the single samples for the Library I use AKG K-1000 headphones a lot, too. - Mixing of the demos was mostly done on PMC MB-1 (if I remember the number correctly). At our appearances on upcoming trade-shows you will hear and see Dynaudio's Air-15, combined with two Base-1.

The palette of reverbs used in the demo-mixes is quite diverse - on the one hand because we are always eager to try new stuff, on the other hand because intimate solo-pieces simply need other "rooms" as large-scale orchestral stuff. Lately, the Yamaha S-Rev 1 Sampling-Reverb was used pretty often as a "fire and forget"-solution in an astonishing large number of occasions. As a possible alternative, the AltiVerb from AudioEase is a new contender in my arsenal.

During many other sessions the System 6000 from TC electronics was my main reverbation unit, combined with several Waves TruVerbs inserted into single instrument-tracks as individually controllable early reflections-engines (... you can vary the reflection-patterns very easy on this plug-in to avoid resonating artefacts); for those "artificial", glassy reverb-tails I used TDM plug-ins like RealVerb, from time to time. Apart from this, I like a tad of (high-cut) echoes on heroic brass themes, when I have the freedom to do so in less "authentic", more soundtrack-oriented pieces.

I hope this answered your questions.

All the best,

/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library

[Dietz]

PS: The demos given at the trade-shows mentioned above will feature TC electronics' M3000 for real-time reverb ;-]