hi,
i´m new here and use vsl sounds and vienna suite since a few months. i have the problem that my mixes dont have the space we know from professional recordings.
i place the instruments in the stereo room in a lot of different positions, as they sit in a real orchestra and i use different predelays on my reverb up to 50 ms for the neerest instruments and less to the instruments in the background. i take 4 differnt predelays. ok, it sounds better than with only one reverb, but the instruments sound still to neer.
what can i do to make the mix more transparent. i tried to use high damping on the reverb, but i could´nt find informations how much i should damp for example in a warm hall. down to 6000 hz or even more down to 4000. let the damping start directly with the start of the reverb or later when the walls of the hall absorb more and more the reflections. what´s with the deep reverb? is it better to let it start at 300 hz or so?
can someone give me a help.
peter
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not enough space in my sound
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can you provide an audio sample of the current mix? It might be easier to help then.
There are two absolutely fundamental techniques that you may have already tried, but did not mention:
1. adjusting the wet-dry mix.
2. Using power-panning, reducing ALL solo instruments to mono. Then, place the mono signal in the desired stereo position.
A third trick is less important, but based on what you said, it may be relevant:
3. Using EQ to simulate "bass loss" on many of the instruments, particularly brass. Personally I found this was more important than reducing high frequencies. I can't remember exactly, but I think my generic brass EQ is starts around 800 Hz - 1 KHz, and goes around 3-4 dB per octave to reduce the bass. doing this also helps the woodwinds too, especially the flute.
Do any of these suggestions help?
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The above reply is good - but I wouldn't reduce most instruments to totally mono that's just me I think the stereo information is important in there. IF you are going to mono them, I recommend muting one channel instead of using powerpan because you are blending the two channels together, a more accurate representation of a mono recording of the instrument is to simply mute one channel as though it was only recorded with one mic to start with. Since they were recorded quite close together, that makes sense to me. Second to that, from what I have seen so far - get MIR PRO! It will solve all those problems and in a fast and easy to use efficient interface. VSL library was designed to be used with something like MIR Pro in the future (which is now) - all instruments recorded at I think the same distance, on a specially built dry stage. This allows maximum flexibility later on, but of course with flexibility comes more work to be done - they're not ready out of the box. But MIR seems to solve all of that perfectly - you get the flexibility and ease of use at the same time.
For bass reduction I have dropped as much as 12db off certain instruments to help place them up to as high as 1khz. They are recorded in all their full glory in this library, so you have to do that to place things. Listen to the same instruments in recordings you like and listen to their freq distribution.
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thank you for your tipps. how can i put an audio sample here? is it possible to put a cubase cpr file here in some way or send it directly to you? how can i make to reduce instrumets in power panning to mono and then place it in the stereo position?? by reducing the eq in brass you mean the eq of the sound or - as i did - only from the reverb?
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I'm sure there's now a better way to do it, but in Logic you have to go into preferences and I *think* turn off universal track option, then you can have independent faders and panners for each side of a Left and Right stereo pair, then you mute one. In Cubase I don't know how to do it. Anyone else know? I don't use this technique just keep everything in stereo (even if you reduce the stereo width quite considerably but don't go completely to mono using the powerpanner)
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In Cubase, you can change the routing for L and R channels separately. I don't have Cubase installed at the moment, but if I remember correctly, there is a "channel settings" window that you can open, which shows more details about the channel than the mixer does. Somewhere there, you can select the output target of L and R channels separately. I can't remember though, it might be too awkward to do that.
Also, you asked about how to do powerpan in Cubase. I think if you right click you can choose between different panning modes (you need the full version of Cubase, though). The "Stereo Combined Panner" is similar to VSL's power-panning plugin. If you make both sliders very close to each other, you get effectively a "almost mono" signal, but you can still move both sliders simultaneously to "place the mono signal in stereo". This allows you to control both "stereo spread" and "stereo positioning" at the same time... for solo instruments its better to reduce the stereo spread a lot.
I guess mpower88 and I have different experiences about adjusting the stereo spread... I suppose both approaches are valid, depending on the mix. =)
And I completely agree that MIR is much better solution overall. But I'm surviving with Vienna Suite for now. =)
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Ok thanks actually I'm going to check that out myself. VSL's Powerpan is quite a bit more powerful than the Cubase panner but yes it does have that function. As for mono instruments - I suppose I just never saw any particular gain in doing that, but I can see how it would be useful. It's definitely preferable (to me anyway) to use one channel of the stereo mix if you are going for a completely mono sound.
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@mpower88 said:
[...] It's definitely preferable (to me anyway) to use one channel of the stereo mix if you are going for a completely mono sound.... which is not necessarily a good idea, as you may lose signal components that are not inherent to both sides. It might be obvious in cases like grand piano, marimba, vibraphone, or any kind of ensemble. But the same is true (in a less obvious) way for any kind of instrument that isn't recorded exactly from the symmetry axis.
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
Well there you have it, perhaps that's why I never liked the sound of doing that myself. IMO, you can go close to mono with the power pan, but not mono, and Dietz now says using one channel of the stereo pair is not advisable which in my experience is usually right - although I wasn't thinking of piano but more specifically individual instruments, clarinet, oboe, etc. Obviously I don't think you would want to do that for any ensemble parts or larger instruments like piano.
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@mpower88 said:
[...] I wasn't thinking of piano but more specifically individual instruments, clarinet, oboe, etc. Obviously I don't think you would want to do that for any ensemble parts or larger instruments like piano.Of course not - I was just trying to give some exaggerated examples to make clear what I'm talking about. 😊
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
As long as you use the same features (and the same pan-law!), there should be none. VS Power Panner has more options, though (Pre/Post Balance, Phase Switches etc.) and of course better visualisation.
OTOH, VE Pro 5 offers full-fledged surround-panning, which VS can't do.
HTH,
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
You know what, I think Dietz would better answer that. I tend to use the panners in VE Pro and suite fairly simply - for panning and playing around with the stereo width - it In fact I generally don't use the Suite panner, I find the one in VE Pro perfectly good. The one in Vienna Suite comes with more options, you can control the left right balance at the input and the output of the panner. Why don't you download the trial and try it out.
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Thanks for the answer. I've mostly used the VE Pro (4) version so far, but the VS version is visually easier. Sometimes I can't tell if there's a difference in sound because I'm deaf in one ear. So, a lot of my panning has to be done almost intellectually, as there's no stereo for me.
I need to try out MIR. Looks and sounds good to me. But I just bought VS, so have to replenish the purse first.
Mahlon
