Thank you very much for the explanations and assistance! I will give the SP2016 reverb another chance and experiment a bit. Yes, exactly, I mean the possibility to dial in both early and late reflections independently. Sorry, maybe something went wrong in the translation into English. I would also find it good if you could directly and separately influence the early reflections in algorithms like Hall and Dualverb. I can’t exactly describe why I like the ModEchoVerb best so far. I find the early reflections very nice and how they change with the size of the room. But here too, a detailed setting option would be advantageous. At least that you can adjust the volume of the early reflections. I have also thought about using a pre-delay. However, you also „waste“ an algorithm with that.
Of course, happy to help out. Enjoy your sonic exploration, and remember that it’s half the fun of finally getting to your new favorite tones. As one of my favorite Rush tunes says – the point of a journey is not to arrive.
It’s not an English translation thing, it’s that so many of the parameter terms around reverb are slightly in conflict with the same terminology from room acoustics and signal processing so it’s just a matter of us talking through things to make sure we mean the same thing, so I can better help you out.
Reverb algorithms can be tricky beasts, a lot of the time reverb designers will tune both early and late reflections VERY carefully because it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot and get something that sounds much much too buzzy and resonant, or going in the other direction it can sound too sparse and not very realistic. All reflections in the algorithm are a tap dance of getting each delay time carefully constructed in relation to all others. This to say, I don’t want you to end up with an algorithm that is difficult to tune and get sounding smooth/musical, as getting that balance and blend right is complicated and a lot of careful work.
Definitely spend more time with SP2016, I think once you wrap your head around how the parameters are linked you will get a LOT more mileage out of it. And sure it requires two algorithms to run an early reflections and full reverb algorithm, but I think you’ll be surprised at just how many classes of sounds you can get with that potent pairing.
A few additional notes, off the top of my head:
- You don’t need a lot of delays and feedback in an early reflection algorithm. In room acoustics, the larger concert halls tend to have a late field kick in by about 75 ms at the latest, though that tends to be for bigger concert halls measuring unamplified (“classical”) ensembles like string quartets and orchestras.
- Hence, I really think you can get a lot of mileage out of MicroPitch or Headspace for this task. A common trick is to start with Fibonacci numbers, keeping in mind you want the echoes (with feedback) to decay by the 50ish ms mark for a 2 second decay.
- UltraTap – I don’t know why I didn’t think of this one yesterday. It will work wonderfully as an Early Reflections machine.
- It seems like an odd beast for this task, but Blackhole is actually pretty good for early reflections. Small Size from 0-20, Inverse Gravity values closer to -30 to -50, low feedback, keep Mod Depth low (maybe around 5 or 10?). No pre delay, Feedback set to 10 or lower. I recommend you back the Low value off too, to prevent the reflections from turning in to mud.
- Dual verb can also work well, if you tune one algorithm to be pretty short and another to be much longer. Tune the first reverb so it’s a slight puff or bloom of attack, then the second reverb so it’s your long late and smooth decay.
