# Reverb for Solo Strings and Solo Woodwinds



## CatComposer (Apr 2, 2021)

Reverb makes such a huge difference to the final sound that I want it to be as near perfect as can be.
However, I'm not an audio engineer, so would prefer to use a Reverb plugin that is intuitive and has some suitable presets.

I've had a look at Valhalla Room and Seventh Heaven and that's about my limit when it comes to complexity.

So, for music made for a close, intimate feel, by solo strings (such as Tina Guo Cello vol 1) and Solo Woodwinds (such as Berlin woodwinds soloists 1)








Berlin Woodwinds Soloists 1


Five expressive instruments for intricate and eloquent melodies. Expertly played and meticulously recorded, these instruments are instantly playable, with enough detail to create totally convincing and compelling performances.




www.orchestraltools.com




Which reverb would be best?

I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a reverb plugin, or buy one that has old-school knobs and requires an audio engineer to drive it!

Someone suggested to me a while ago, that the stock reverb that comes with Cubase would be fine, however, 
I don't know if they understood my desire for perfection. 
And then there's the reverb that comes with the VSTs themselves, which usually sounds pretty nice.

I am just looking for the best final result.

I know it's partly a matter of personal taste, and I don't want heavy reverb that tires the listener, 
but I am aware that each program uses it's own algorithms and so the reverb that is produced is unique.

On this forum I'm hoping there are some who have experimented with many available reverbs for similar music production and can give me some helpful advice.
Thank you!


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

Best Reverb Plugins for Cinematic Orchestral & Trailer Music


Hey Everyone, I've been using NI's RC 48 and Valhalla Supermassive for a year now and I am getting good results with them. Many artists prefer Blackhole and Valhalla Room. How good are these plugins? My humble understanding of reverberation is to have a convolution reverb on the master bus so...




vi-control.net


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

My reverb adventure reaches an end....


I like a lot of reverb on music, whether it's real instruments in real space, or virtual instruments in sample world. Some people think lots of reverb is for beginners only. I think... no. If you follow the VI-Control Discord, you may have noticed that I've been obnoxiously caught up in reverb...




vi-control.net


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

The ones I recommend:

For spatialization:
- MConvolutionMB (for convolution)
- Waves IR1 (for convolution) 
- Eareckon EAReverb2 (2D staging)
- DearVR Pro (2D staging)
- MReverbMB (2D staging)

For tails:
- Valhalla Vintage Verb (Lexicon vibe)
- MTurboReverb (if I want to dive deep)
- Cinematic Rooms (transparent)
- Seventh Heaven Core (preferred sound)
- the Relab verbs (sound good)
- Waves H-Reverb (sounds good)

If I had to pick a pair:
- MConvolutionEZ or MB
- Seventh Heaven Core

Can’t fail with those two. One of which is basically free and the other’s $69.


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## CatComposer (Apr 2, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> The ones I recommend:
> 
> For spatialization:
> - MConvolutionMB (for convolution)
> ...


Thank for the tips!
Do you know if any are more suited for small rooms?
The Berlin Solo Woodwinds were recorded in the dry Teldex Solo Booth.

I'm not looking for large hall reverbs as you might use for a full orchestra.


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

Most if not all convo reverbs cater for that. In the sense that they offer IRs that were recorded in rooms or smaller venues. Algo reverbs typically have rooms settings as well. Dial in the suitable ERs corresponding to a smaller room, trim down the reverberation time et voila! (For instance: Valhalla Room  )

PS: I know what your next question is going to be. Answer: no, noone has an IR recorded at the Teldex stage, solo booth etc.

Also, I hate to disappoint you... but there is hardly such a thing as “a reverb that is best suited to usecase X or instrument Y”. Much of it, if not all, boils down to subjective perception and taste of... you... the music maker. I strongly suggest you demo different reverbs, buy some cheaper good ones (Nimbus, R4, Valhalla) and experiment. It really is the only way to find out which is the one that suits you.


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## Ben (Apr 2, 2021)

Vienna Suite Pro's Hybrid Reverb Pro 
It has a great IR engine, IRs (and you can use your own IRs as well) + Algorithmic reverb. I use it in most of my projects.

Infos / Manual: https://www.vsl.info/manuals/vienna-suite-pro/hybrid-reverb-pro

Product Page: https://www.vsl.co.at/Vienna_Software_Package/Vienna_Suite_PRO


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## CatComposer (Apr 2, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> Most if not all convo reverbs cater for that. In the sense that they offer IRs that were recorded in rooms or smaller venues. Algo reverbs typically have rooms settings as well. Dial in the suitable ERs corresponding to a smaller room, trim down the reverberation time et voila! (For instance: Valhalla Room  )
> 
> PS: I know what your next question is going to be. Answer: no, noone has an IR recorded at the Teldex stage, solo booth etc.
> 
> Also, I hate to disappoint you... but there is hardly such a thing as “a reverb that is best suited to usecase X or instrument Y”. Much of it, if not all, boils down to subjective perception and taste of... you... the music maker. I strongly suggest you demo different reverbs, buy some cheaper good ones (Nimbus, R4, Valhalla) and experiment. It really is the only way to find out which is the one that suits you.


Yes, that's what I thought.
However, I have seen reverb presets for specific instruments and thought those might be of more help, given that there are so many variables of reverb that can be tweaked, and I don't know which are the best values for my needs.
Also, 90% of reverb presets I have seen are for large spaces, with perhaps one small room preset.
I just thought there might be a plugin that had more of a focus on perfecting small room reverb.


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

Presets.
Yeah. No.


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## CatComposer (Apr 2, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> Most if not all convo reverbs cater for that. In the sense that they offer IRs that were recorded in rooms or smaller venues. Algo reverbs typically have rooms settings as well. Dial in the suitable ERs corresponding to a smaller room, trim down the reverberation time et voila! (For instance: Valhalla Room  )
> 
> PS: I know what your next question is going to be. Answer: no, noone has an IR recorded at the Teldex stage, solo booth etc.
> 
> Also, I hate to disappoint you... but there is hardly such a thing as “a reverb that is best suited to usecase X or instrument Y”. Much of it, if not all, boils down to subjective perception and taste of... you... the music maker. I strongly suggest you demo different reverbs, buy some cheaper good ones (Nimbus, R4, Valhalla) and experiment. It really is the only way to find out which is the one that suits you.


I really appreciate your advice. Thanks for contributing!


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## doctoremmet (Apr 2, 2021)

Sseltenrych said:


> I really appreciate your advice. Thanks for contributing!


My pleasure. Pro tip: read up on the reverb tips forum members @Cory Pelizzari @Beat Kaufmann and @Joël Dollié have given. The precious litlle good things I now know about reverb is because of them, all the mistakes I still make are my own


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## ism (Apr 2, 2021)

On a *much* simpler (simplistic some would say) level. I generally go with a Valhalla Room preset (often a cathedral reverb) but then draw back the early reflections to taste. 

If I’m mixing something dry (ie OT WW soloists) with something wet (ie SSW), I’ll have a second instance of the same reverb with the early reflections set to 0, to get some long tail on the wet samples without muddying the room already baked into recorded. Then with everything having a long tail that gives at least some sense of sounding like they’re same space, I’ll add early reflections to thicken the dry samples.

Unsophisticated, to be sure. But it sometimes works pretty well, depending on the libraries involved.


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## CatComposer (Apr 2, 2021)

ism said:


> On a *much* simpler (simplistic some would say) level. I generally go with a Valhalla Room preset (often a cathedral reverb) but then draw back the early reflections to taste.
> 
> If I’m mixing something dry (ie OT WW soloists) with something wet (ie SSW), I’ll have a second instance of the same reverb with the early reflections set to 0, to get some long tail on the wet samples without muddying the room already baked into recorded. Then with everything having a long tail that gives at least some sense of sounding like they’re same space, I’ll add early reflections to thicken the dry samples.
> 
> Unsophisticated, to be sure. But it sometimes works pretty well, depending on the libraries involved.


Thanks for sharing your method.
I would probably need to see a detailed video tutorial to be able to replicate it. 
Did you learn that from experimentation, or is that a method you were taught?


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## Toecutter (Apr 2, 2021)

Altiverb Teldex IR is my first choice when I need to blend the Berlin Orchestra with other libraries. I don't think there's an IR of the Sony stage (Tina Guo was recorded there) but Spaces So Cal Hall sounds great with the Cinesamples stuff


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## Tremendouz (Apr 2, 2021)

Toecutter said:


> but Spaces So Cal Hall sounds great with the Cinesamples stuff


I feel like it sounds great with everything haha


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## Russell Anderson (Apr 3, 2021)

I see you have Cubase. If you want very good and very straightforward results, I highly recommend convolution. It will cost you all of $0 to get some absolutely fantastic results as there are well-recorded mpulse responses of different spaces strewn across the internet and you can go as deep into processing them as you'd like with sample modification. Or just throw them in the reverb unit and go, that's often all you have to do besides setting the pre-delay, dry/wet and if your reverb has it, pre-width (post-width is often not mono-compatible; if the setting isn't available and you want it, throw a Polyverse Wider or Ozone Imager II on the wet send buss to process the wet signal only and widen it up that way).

No matter what you end up doing, you'll probably want to end up splitting the wet and dry signal in your mixer so you can EQ the signal going into and coming out of the reverb without affecting the dry signal.

Algorithmically, I'm not sure about Cubase's stock reverb, so if that's something you want to get into, if you're not finding it's suiting your needs, download some demos.
- 7th Heaven standard is very easy to dial in and quite popular
- Nimbus + R4 go on sale for $29 apiece every couple of months and can be had for similar costs second-hand here or on kvraudio.com;
- Acon Verberate 2 for around $70 used;
- Valhalla Room for $50 or maybe cheaper if you buy used.

Pro-R is where you start getting into the >$100 range and personally (reverb is a really subjective thing and can change moment-to-moment) I don't think it's any better than something like Nimbus, in fact I prefer Nimbus but I'd sure appreciate the ease-of-use of Pro-R's style of damping. Hate to say it, but there are some pretty nice reverbs up here that aren't going to hurt your ears. Cinematic

anyway before I start geeking out about reverbs too hard, demo those (and some demos last FOREVER by the way, Valhalla + Acon Verberate + 2cAudio, you can demo them for the next 36 months!). One of the things you'll probably want to pay attention to for small ensembles is early reflections, as in sparser mixes those will govern a lot of the sense of space, realism and color. So will tails obviously, but, those are so subjective... You'll just have to demo them. On the subject of ERs, it's perhaps so that nothing will beat IRs (besides MTurboReverb but as you don't want complexity, that's the absolute last, lowest-priority amazing, wonderful thing you'd want to get your hands on), but Nimbus/R4 offer excellent control over this and general sense of depth, especially with pre-panned input. Relab VSR24 (which I did not mention because of price, but it's I believe $150 right now and fantastic for realistic early reflections and fantastic tails) and Acon are more straightforward (possibly valhalla as well) with drop-down ER presets. Pro-R, again, I haven't used it much, but doesn't seem to offer control over ER besides level/balance (and yet seems to sound good), take my words with a grain of salt here. 7H, totally up to you to demo and find out yourself.

Also, panagement 2 is free and will give you a pretty functional 2D positioning tool, it's basically baby Precedence by 2cAudio and the list doctoremmet provided will also give you good spatialization; just these plugins all have costs, basically. Pre-panning your input signal into a reverb like Nimbus will get you a good result, imo, so will Panagement.

Good luck.


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## Beat Kaufmann (Apr 3, 2021)

Sseltenrych said:


> ...On this forum I'm hoping there are some who have experimented with many available reverbs for similar music production and can give me some helpful advice.
> Thank you!


The question about the best DAW or, in your case, the best reverb for solo instruments usually results in a lot of products being mentioned and then again you don't know which one to choose.
In the context of mixing orchestras and solo instruments, 2 things are important that a reverb plug-in should be able to do:
*1)* push instruments https://www.beat-kaufmann.com/mixing-an-orchestra/downloads/timpani_close-depth_nur_er.mp3 (into the depth, without much reverb tail).
This is needed to place the brass instruments behind the strings, for example.

What you're asking for:
*2)* add reverb to (solo) instruments without pushing them into depth at the same time.
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Both of these points can be tried out to see if perhaps the tools you already have can accomplish these tasks. Many of the tools already listed above can do one thing or another well.

For *2)* I can offer you a video:


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Here you can find more info about Reverbs.

All the best
Beat


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## ism (Apr 3, 2021)

Sseltenrych said:


> I would probably need to see a detailed video tutorial to be able to replicate it.
> Did you learn that from experimentation, or is that a method you were taught?



The larger thing is to get a internalize your own sense of what reverb, and microphones are doing to the sound.

Start with a nice big, unsubtle cathedral reverb in Valhalla Room, and a wet library and a dry library. Then experiment with dealing up and down the early reflections.

On the dry instrument, the late reflections carry a sense of space, but absent the early reflections, there's a flatness to the sound. Adding early reflections thickens the sound in ways that can be very nice, but are somewhat stylized, in they're never going to contain the richness of spacial information in a tree mic of a wet library.

On the wet instrument, experiment with tree vs close mics vs early reflections.

My experience (mostly with Spitfire libraries) is that the tree mic is where the magic happens. You can add detail with the close mic, and create a sense of space with long reflection in a Valhalla Room reverb, but fundamentally, it's the tree mic that carries the room and the sense of embodiment in a real space. You can experiment with adding early reflection, but I find this muddies the sound.


There are certainly more complex, detailed tutorial that will teach you more advanced techniques, but nothing substituted from really developing an intuitive sense of what's happening to the sound.

Simple example: A node with the dry Spitfire Studio strings. Lots of Valhalla reverb, including early reflections which really thicken the sound, giving it a nice "shimmery" texture. It's not necessarily "realistic", but it's quite beautiful, and there's still a kind of "crunchiness" inherent in the dry samples that comes through, even with all the reverb. And I quite like this sound. In some contexts, it's exactly right for what I want the music to convey.




Whereas, here's a noodle that demos a sweet spot I've found with the (very wet) Spitfire solo strings:





This is the same (or similar) Valhalla Room reverb, but with the short reflections turned off, which gives it an especially large sense of space, without excessively muddying either the detail of the close mics or the spatial embodiment of the tree mics. 

It also uses 100% close mic + ~45% tree. And in terms of what I *love* about this sound, it's all about the tree. Early Valhalla reflections would muddy the sound. Putting the tree less that 45% looses the sense of embodiment. Putting the tree above ~55% and you loose the detail of the close mics. 

Again, it's not necessarily "realistic" in that if you're sitting in a hall, you would be hearing this much close mic. But it's a mix that capture the a sweet spot of both gorgeous detail of the performance and the instrument embodied spatiality of the hall, augmented but even bigger cathedral late reflections from Valhalla.

@Beat Kaufmann 's advice is going to be much better and *much* more sophisticated than my own.

But the point I hope to make here is that the key to figuring this stuff out is that first and foremost, the thing to do is find a way to actively developing an understand - on an intuitive, visceral, level - of what's going on sonically when you choose a reverb or tweak a knob, or add a close mic.


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## sinkd (Apr 3, 2021)

Ben said:


> Vienna Suite Pro's Hybrid Reverb Pro
> It has a great IR engine, IRs (and you can use your own IRs as well) + Algorithmic reverb. I use it in most of my projects.
> 
> Infos / Manual: https://www.vsl.info/manuals/vienna-suite-pro/hybrid-reverb-pro
> ...


+1 You also get the basic convolution engine with Vienna Suite and several other top of class plugins.


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## doctoremmet (Apr 3, 2021)

I maybe did not make it explicitly clear that Melda offer a convolution reverb for free. It is called MConvolutionEZ and comes with a bunch of IRs. The Meldaproduction MFreeBundle also includes MCharmVerb - which is basically one algorithm taken from MTurboReverb. (Plus tons of other very usable mixing tools). Both reverbs sound very good and may be cool free options for you to experiment with.


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## Russell Anderson (Apr 3, 2021)

MCharmverb also may be able to load impulse responses and presumably build early reflections out of them, which is a feature of the much more advanced melda reverbs. But maybe not (I haven’t tried that yet admittedly, but the ability to load them is there).



Sseltenrych said:


> And then there's the reverb that comes with the VSTs themselves, which usually sounds pretty nice.
> 
> I am just looking for the best final result.


The libraries you mention all use convolution. 

As was mentioned, adding early reflections to a recorded space can confuse the spatialization unless the added space matches or can engance the instrument space. It is interesting to try routing only the ambient mics to a reverb, or ambient + close; and for any mic, one that can turn off its early reflections.


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## doctoremmet (Apr 3, 2021)

Russell Anderson said:


> MCharmverb also may be able to load impulse responses


No that is the sole domain of MTurboReverb (non LE). At least the ER building bit.

The free MConvoEZ does allow loading IRs.


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## CatComposer (Apr 3, 2021)

doctoremmet said:


> I maybe did not make it explicitly clear that Melda offer a convolution reverb for free. It is called MConvolutionEZ and comes with a bunch of IRs. The Meldaproduction MFreeBundle also includes MCharmVerb - which is basically one algorithm taken from MTurboReverb. (Plus tons of other very usable mixing tools). Both reverbs sound very good and may be cool free options for you to experiment with.


I did see that in the list when I downloaded something from them, but as I hadn't seen anyone mention it before, I wondered if it was any good.


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## CatComposer (Apr 3, 2021)

Russell Anderson said:


> MCharmverb also may be able to load impulse responses and presumably build early reflections out of them, which is a feature of the much more advanced melda reverbs. But maybe not (I haven’t tried that yet admittedly, but the ability to load them is there).
> 
> 
> The libraries you mention all use convolution.
> ...


Thanks for your detailed input.
It's all very useful.


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## CatComposer (Apr 3, 2021)

Beat Kaufmann said:


> The question about the best DAW or, in your case, the best reverb for solo instruments usually results in a lot of products being mentioned and then again you don't know which one to choose.
> In the context of mixing orchestras and solo instruments, 2 things are important that a reverb plug-in should be able to do:
> *1)* push instruments https://www.beat-kaufmann.com/mixing-an-orchestra/downloads/timpani_close-depth_nur_er.mp3 (into the depth, without much reverb tail).
> This is needed to place the brass instruments behind the strings, for example.
> ...



Thank you Beat


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## Petrucci (Apr 4, 2021)

You can also demo VSL MIR and see what it can do for your music.


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