Not speaking for Eamonn, but I could see, for maximum realism, a rationale for using different reverbs for each section of the choir since they are situated at different distances from the listener – as it’s not just the amount of reverb that varies based on distance, but the nature of the reverb (e.g., reverb time and predelay) as well. In a typical STBA arrangement, the tenors and basses would be farthest away from the listener, with the sopranos and altos closer in on both sides.
Both of those articles appear to have been hastily written and have typos and a few inaccuracies, but they provide a really useful overview of the possibilities.
Yes but if you are going to go into that level of detail, there are multiple ways to address it, and primarily you are looking at different predelay times specifically for what you are discussing, something that can be handled with careful routing, panning, and inserting delay appropriately. And of course appropriate reverbs. Some reverbs even allow you to place within a 3D space to modify this to an extent, though I don’t think I have seen a Linux native one yet.
EDIT: Forgot to address another aspect of this. While you are not incorrect for a ‘traditional’ choir in terms of placement, reality is many choirs don’t follow this (Outside of maybe school choirs) in my experience, and adjust based off the needs of balancing acoustically, fitting the space, etc. Also if you want to be ‘realistic’… for most people the amount of reverb will not change appreciably based off the placement of the person in the space in terms of a choir layout, they will all effectively have the same ‘amount’ of reverb, though some frequencies in the space may be more efficient in reverberation than others, giving an illusion of different voices getting a stronger reverb as those voices go into those frequency ranges, but again other ways to handle that as well.
You are not incorrect, but I would argue that especially if you are starting out, it is better to use a single reverb, it is far more important to have your ‘choir’ sound like it is performing in the same space, than to try to get to a level of detail you may not even be able to truly hear, and increasing your work multiple times. Not to mention the a-reverb in particular is a bit basic to even address that aspect of it, I would suggest other reverbs especially on voice in general.
Pay more attention to your panning, dynamics, timing, and mixing, you will get a good strong result. Neither way is wrong necessarily, but if you are starting out and learning, it is far more important to understand the effect of those things than to go overboard trying to get detail out of the reverb that may not exist. There is a reason I address all of those aspects in the students I teach before I even touch on reverb.
The articles aren’t bad, but a quick skim through, two things not addressed in those articles:
The effect of EQ on depth.
The effect of Dynamics Processing (Compression in particular) on depth. This gets touched on by their sections on faders, but I would argue there is far more to it than just riding faders up and down.
Don’t have time at the moment to write out articles on the effects but both of these also play into building a 2D soundstage (I would argue what they describe in the article is a 2D soundstage, not 3D, and is 99% of what we think of when talking about music mixing and stereo playback).
Small clarification on the multiple reverb in my example : the reverb specific to each voice would be used to simulate depth, but as mentioned above, there is much more to it than just reverb (early reflections, etc). The reverb used on the master-choir bus would be the one i would use the simulate space.
Today though, I mostly use Panagement to simulate depth.
From all those information, I think you need now to experiment on the subject and see what notion and technique sticks with you. You’ll always have time to expand to more complicated schemes once you’ve reached a first workflow that works for you
Same here since I realized it was available for Linux. One reverb for space (often zita-rev1 or dragonfly) and Panagement for depth. As @seablade stated, there are many ways to crack this nut depending on experience, time available and how prominent the vocals will be in a mix. Good luck, @thht!
Well that is a shame, it prevents taking the session cleanly between platforms sadly. Would love to see lv2 or vst3 on all platforms, obviously I would rather lv2 but either can work.
wow. i never thought this would grow into such a complex and rich topic.
thanks to all of you for your suggestions. i will of course, take it slow and start with a low complexity and then see where things take me. but thanks for laying out and explaining so many options!
when the piece is finished, i will for sure post it in the “made with ardour” section and leave a small comment here so if you are interested, you can hear how it turned out.
Panagement 2 is awesome. It would be even better if it had multiple inputs to use it for an entire mix, but that doesn’t seem to be feasible (see discussion).
One word of caution though: part of its effectiveness derives from the use of delay between the left and right output channels. This means that the stereo output is not mono-compatible: summing the two channels will result in comb filtering and degradation of tonal quality.
This may or may not be a problem when used for final mixing, depending on usage; it’s definitely a problem when generating a stereo signal that is then mixed in ways that change its stereo width, because that will cause a partial or total summation of the two channels.
(Apologies to the original poster for the off-topic.)
Correct, this is the danger of delay based panning and building stereo image through the use of delays, and a very good thing to point out.
Any time you have two signals with different timings summed together you will get comb filtering, how bad depends on timing difference and frequency content, so you should always check your mixes for mono compatibility. Even in today’s society it can be important as some mixes may be listened to for instance on a cell phone speaker phone which may as well be mono, or in some venues over mono systems … remember two or more speakers doesn’t necessarily mean stereo reproduction.
However, one can disable the delay in Panagement 2: then it will only use level differences (like a standard pan-pot control) and early reflection/reverb levels. It will be less effective but mono-compatible, and still a very good user interface.
hi again,
so, i finally got to the stage in which i try to optimize the sound including width and depth.
however, my problem is that i now have 16 tracks that all are going to need their own equalizer and panagement. this seems to get to the limit of what my fairly new laptop can handle.
i am using the calf equalizer, btw… but already panagement on 4 tracks is too much if i turn on reverb in there and also use dragonfly reverb for all tracks…
See my previous comments, I would strongly suggest you consider not using a copy of Dragonfly on each track, use a bus and send to handle that instead. Haven’t used Panagement to know how heavy it is on DSP, but Reverb in general is one of the heavier DSP processes.
Also make sure you are using a larger buffer size if you are just working on editing and mixing.
Alright. As promised, I uploaded the final version and present it in the “Made with Ardour” section.
In the end, I just used Dragonfly Reverb on the master bus directly because it sounded good enough for me like that. Panagement is really great and gives a nice stereo field, even using only the free version (i.e. no delay).
I know, it is not perfect but considering that this is my first track, I am pretty happy with it.
Thanks again for all the input. I really learned a lot.
And last but not least, I must say, that this is a really great community with friendly, nice and helpful people!
