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  • Mixing VSL with East West Instruments: Storm Drum, Ra, ETC.

    VSL is recorded (mostly) dry, and with the instrument centered, taking up the entire stereo field. I know that in order to properly place the instruments in a room, the stereo image must be made narrower, and then panned to its correct position, and then an Impulse Reverb can be applied.

    East West instruments are mostly recorded pre-panned, and recorded wet. I'm a little bit confused about how I can place the East West Instruments in the same "room" as the VSL orchestra. I have Storm Drum, and Ra. If I narrowed the stereo image, the reverb that was recorded with the instrument is narrowed too. Is it ok to do this, and then apply the same convolution reverb to the instrument as the rest of the VSL. Will that make the instrument too "wet"?

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    last edited

    @bowserlm said:

    VSL is recorded (mostly) dry, and with the instrument centered, taking up the entire stereo field. I know that in order to properly place the instruments in a room, the stereo image must be made narrower, and then panned to its correct position, and then an Impulse Reverb can be applied.

    East West instruments are mostly recorded pre-panned, and recorded wet. I'm a little bit confused about how I can place the East West Instruments in the same "room" as the VSL orchestra. I have Storm Drum, and Ra. If I narrowed the stereo image, the reverb that was recorded with the instrument is narrowed too. Is it ok to do this, and then apply the same convolution reverb to the instrument as the rest of the VSL. Will that make the instrument too "wet"?

    It is not true that EW instruments are recorded already "in position". This is true for the orchestral instruments, but SD an RA are recorded dead centre (if memory serves correctly). There is also much less hall sound on these products, because I don't think that they were recorded in a hall! Therefore, you should be able to narrow the stereo width, should you choose to do, so and then place them in a room of your choice using a convolution reverb. I agree that they have more room ambiance than VSL, so you may have to be careful about which rooms (or even how much tail) you use for each product, but it should work.

    If you are using the orchestral products, then the best way is to leave EW as it is, add a "placement" reverb to VSL with a sufficiently long tail to match EW and then maybe add a touch of Lex or something just to make the whole mix gel. Trial and error on most of this I'm afraid.

    D