It’s hardly worth mentioning the workstation here because there’s so little going on.
I did a guide track and then recorder the four vocal parts. They bus to the dragonfly room reverb which then busses to the dragonfly hall reverb. There’s a slightly different eq on each voice. That’s it.
Constructive criticism welcome.
Very nice. The only comment I have is that the commercial recordings of this style that I own have much more noticeable reverb, so it may be more idiomatic to have a wetter mix.
Thanks Chirs. I’m really glad to hear this because I originally started dryer and I was debating whether I’d over done it on the reverb front. Do you think the other recordings you’ve heard are in a good room and you’re hearing a lot of room in the mic or do you think it’s being added afterwards?
The recordings I have tend to be from labels which go for a very unprocessed sound, so are recorded in historic buildings like old concert halls or very old stone churches.
Yeah, this needs LOTS more reverb.
Maybe for the next one I’ll go to church and use a surround mic and bleed some reverb in like that. @Ricardus How would you achieve it do you think? Would you do the same thing that I did by chaining a room reverb into a hall reverb or would you just use the one but just go bigger?
If you think of what is happening with the calculations in that case, there are simulated reflections and reverb coming at a shorter time from the room reverb, and then at a longer time from the hall reverb.
If you try to imagine how you would have something like that occurring naturally, it seems like it would involve really bizarre architecture.
If you want a natural sounding reverb you could try an impulse response based reverb, and load a recorded response from a real church or old concert hall.
The x42 convolver has some links to free impulse responses on the download page:
x42 Z-convolver
Maybe one of the cathedrals, or the Concertgebouw reverb would be an appropriate fit.
Depending on the venue you can pick up more room reflections by not miking the source as closely. Or set up a stereo pair farther away just to pick up room reflections and record to separate tracks, and mix in accordingly.
Or as someone else said, switch to a Hall reverb to get a more spacious sound.
Try putting a delay in front of a reverb and see what you think.
A lot of reverbs have a pre-delay setting which accomplishes that.
Rather than a room reverb and a hall reverb chained it might be more realistic sounding to have a separate early reflection bus that then feeds into the reverb bus so you can play with early reflection to reverb ratio.
Or just use an impulse response from a real room, that will incorporate the entire sequence of reflections and reverberation, but will be limited to where the impulse generator and microphones were placed when capturing the response.
Not quite the same. A Predelay can delay the first reflections but usually does not create multiple copies of the signal to be ‘verbed’, but putting a delay in front of the reverb can create multiple copies of the signal that is then processed. It causes a very different effect, and one I use often.
Seablade
Chris - that’s kind of what I was aiming at with the multiple reverbs so the room reverb provides the early reflections and the hall reverb the larger ones. Many churches are kind of like that where the choir will be in the quire which is almost like a smaller room off the main room. I’ll go back to the project and have another listen with some different settings and amounts on the plugins and see what I think. I’m always a bit timid I think with plugins. I really appreciate folks’ opinion on this and I suppose the main takeaway is that no matter how it gets achieved I need to be less timid with that reverb mix.