Reverb Basics

[Thielecomposer]

Hello everyone, I'm new to Vienna and though I love the very realistic sounds I recieved with the special Edition, I'm somewhat frustrated with a full orchestral sound. Obviously that comes to large extend from my very unexperienced use of reverb. Even though MIR sounds amazing, I can not afford the software and a new 64bit Machine. I'm told (and I am no expert on this) that the ReVerence coming with my Cubase 5 is a somewhat decent reverb plugin. Now I'm having trouble routing it to VE, because it is not listed in the VST plugins in the VE instance. Obviously I could just send the Masterbus to a ReVerence effect-bus but that would give me no opportunity to "place" the single instruments in a virtual room. I ended up routing every instrument to a seperate output or better routing them to groups in VE (e.g. first row of winds etc) and treting their Outputs in Cubase. Now obviously that will only give me the opportunity to be adding reverb post-fader. Does anyone have a solution to that? Another question at the risk of asking the same question every "newbie" will ask. Is there a very basic instruction on how to apply Reverb? Right now it has just been a trial-and-error kind of thing for me, seeing that I consider myself more of a composer than a sound engineer... I looked into Hetoryns Podcast on VSL but I could not seem to find a podcast on the very basics. I'd be very gratefull for some help on the topic of reverb!

[Dietz]

Welcome Thielecomposer,

The main problem with Steinberg's REVerence is that it is a host-locked plugin, which means that it will only work directly in Cubase/Nuendo, not in any other host. Even if you have Vienna Ensemble instantiated _within_ Cubase, it will appear to REVerence that this is outside it's "allowed" VST host.

As an alternative you could use one of the free or cheap freeware/shareware convolution plugins, but they rarely come with high-quality impulse responses - which is much like using lo-fi instrument samples ;-) ... or you could take a glance at professional convolution reverbs like AltiVerb or - of course - Vienna Convolution Reverb, which comes as part of the Vienna Suite plugin bundle.

Regarding reverberation tutorials - we are very aware of the fact that this is a topic that goes beyond the scope of things a composer wants to deal with. As a matter of fact it was one of the basic ideas of MIR to make the creation of believable virtual rooms as intuitive as possible. OTOH, there are quite a few sources available online, for example Beat Kaufmann's tutorials: -> [ULR]http://www.beat-kaufmann.com/[/URL]

HTH,

[gabriel81]

Hi Thielecomposer!

I got much help from a nice little book "The Composere's Approach". It gives you very good generic details about reverb (with lots of theoretical background, but also filled out tables) and also shows exactly how to configure most used sequencers (And Cubase for sure is mentioned). It also has a own chapture for VE ;)

However I am still looking forward to MIR, as i would like to compose not to waste time with reverb ;)

Hope this helps

Gabriel

[Dietz]

@Gabriel said:

[...] i would like to compose not to waste time with reverb ;)

A famous conductor once said something like "You have to perform _with_ the room, not against it. Treat it like an instrument. The biggest one." 😉

[gabriel81]

From a conductors point of view I agree ;) 

I can even remember one famous conductor spending most of the time of the orchestral rehearsal just about rearranging Brass for Verdi Requiem - little bit boring when you are in the Choir and have to do this for 4 different concert halls *g*

However I would like to have a tool where i can just place my instruments and everything else gets done automatically, allowing focusing on composition and samples/patches. (And therefore, as soon i somehow managed my SE i have some good idea what this tool will be)

I could not find this quote who was it?

[Dietz]

[:)]

[Thielecomposer]

Thanks a lot for the help. I'll check out the references you mentioned :)