# Help with reverb in piano ballad song



## pixel (Dec 22, 2014)

Hi 

I'm looking for general tips how to setup reverb in slow ballad (around 50bpm)
Instruments:
-Piano
-Strings: Bass, Cellos, Violins 1st & 2nd (Ensemble + 1st chair for cello and 1st strings)

It's my first time with that kind of composition. I like it wet to hide my amateur piano skills 
Now I have experiment with plate verb (no predelay, Valhallaroom) and really long Hall (~130 predelay, VintageVerb). 

Do you know how it is done in ballad's? It's hard to find any tips about mixing this kind of music


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## RiffWraith (Dec 22, 2014)

pixel @ Tue Dec 23 said:


> Do you know how it is done in ballad's?



It's not necessarily done different in ballads as opposed to other genres of music. With some genres, some engineers may prefer certain reverbs with certain settings over others, but there is no steadfast rule where, "if you have a ballad, you do _this_." Some piano ballad tracks will have a long hall; others a shorter plate. Sometimes pre-delay as used; others not. There is no set pre-delay amount, nor tail length.

Maybe some people around here can give you their Valhallaroom go-to settings for a piano playing a ballad, and those may work for you, but it's really more personal preference than anything. The methodology is always going to be the same, regardless of genre - dial in a setting that you like, and one that serves the instrument and track as a whole well.

Cheers.


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## pixel (Dec 22, 2014)

Thanks for answer 

I'm not looking for prepared recipe. I'm just curious because i know absolutely nothing about this kind of music. 
Maybe it's even better - to work like in old days where I have to learn everything by practice  

I think that my project is ready but still... I love to learn something new every day


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## Andrew Souter (Dec 22, 2014)

Hi.


Check out my various piano music here:

https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter

I am president of 2CAudio, as well as a pianist... 

if you hear something you like, I am happy to tell you how how I achieved it using our verbs...

perhaps some of the slower pieces on the first album are interesting:

https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter/se ... ou-preview


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## pixel (Dec 23, 2014)

Hi Andrew
I will check after xmas time fever 
Cheers


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## pixel (Jan 7, 2015)

Hi again Andrew. Finally I'm back to reality (i think). 

Now I listen to your songs and I became your follower quickly  
So many beautiful tracks, so hard to choose one. 

My choice is: "Unless your love" 

Btw right now I can work only with demo of your plugins. I'm broke after december :wink:


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## Harry (Jan 8, 2015)

I'm a new convert to Aether. I would also be really interested to know how you (Andrew) used your plugins on your piano sound. Very nice pieces.


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## Vin (Jan 8, 2015)

Here's my ValhallaVintageVerb go-to preset for *piano*, if it's of any help:

<ValhallaVintageVerb pluginVersion="1.0.1" presetName="My Hall" Mix="1" PreDelay="0.186000004" Decay="0.361999989" Size="0.870000005" Attack="0.698000014" BassMult="0.44600001" BassXover="0.455000013" HighShelf="0" HighFreq="0.405000001" EarlyDiffusion="0.649999976" LateDiffusion="0.832000017" ModRate="0.0179999992" ModDepth="0.25999999" HighCut="0.324000001" LowCut="0.0439999998" ColorMode="1" ReverbMode="0.0416666679"/>


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## Andrew Souter (Jan 9, 2015)

pixel @ Wed Jan 07 said:


> Hi again Andrew. Finally I'm back to reality (i think).
> 
> Now I listen to your songs and I became your follower quickly
> So many beautiful tracks, so hard to choose one.




Thanks my friend, means a lot! My piano material is very personal to me... happy to hear you enjoy it. It's a pure passion of mine and these projects are purely for the love of it.



pixel @ Wed Jan 07 said:


> My choice is: "Unless your love"



OK, cool. Sometimes simplicity is best. :wink: This one is a three chord composition I did as an improv. (originally it was part of a dance music track actually... which is why it is exactly 128bpm for the entire piece. :wink: )

So for this one, I would say the reverb choice is not exactly authentically natural in the classical music sense. It is a bit exaggerated in a manner that might be appropriate for cinematic work, new age material, inclusion as part of an electronic music thing, and similar uses.

I used B2. The preset is attached. It is a dual engine preset. The A engine provides some immediate "early energy" I say early energy b/c it is a very short and pretty dense burst of "reflection energy" that is designed to give a good sense of immediate "spatial impression". i.e. it makes the piano feel immediately it is in the space and recessed slightly in the sound field.

The B engine provides the tail. It is pre delayed an extra 50ms, and you can notice by looking at the tap display that the delays actually start coming in around 75 or 80ms, but don't get really dense until around 150ms or so.

This is actually representative of a family of presets that are very useful for orchestral/accoustic music: quick short energy energy that should start pretty immediately, and quickly decline to give a sparse area around 50 to 150ms. Then the late diffuse tail area should approach full density and amplitude around 150 to 200ms or so. This general idea was originally discovered by DG in some of his psychoacoustics research. I find it to be quite effective in practice.

The tail here is 4.8sec which is a bit long, but it suites the overly romantic and pop/light nature of the piece IMHO. Modulation depth is also on high side of things for piano, but give a nice lush feeling.

On my second album which I hope to release this month following release of our new (not reverb related) 2CAudio product release, I have generally opted for more "authentically natural" verb settings as the material is itself more classical in nature.

Also I should mention: I follow B2 with a Waves API EQ that cuts a little bit more of the highs--not much really, but the API has some analog modeling stuff going on that presumably smears the micro transients some in the impulse response also, which I suppose it a good thing for a little extra touch. 

And then I follow that by an Izotope Ozone EQ which gives a healthy high pass filter cutting out most of energy below around 150hz or so... This works in this case b/c this style of piano music is "sustain pedal heavy" so there is already sufficient bass energy happening from the sustain in the piano itself. Therefore adding a bunch of verb to the bass freqs tends to make things muddy.

B2 is on a send with 100% wet. Gain of this fx channel is automated slightly to be between -6 and -8dB following the musical changes...

Then gentle compression to the master. That's about it.

Hope it helps! :!: 




pixel @ Wed Jan 07 said:


> Btw right now I can work only with demo of your plugins. I'm broke after december :wink:



Hey no problem. I'm not trying to sell you anything (well, if you like I can, but that's not the point...) It's just fun to talk piano and reverb. It's great to bounce around ideas with like minded people, and this forum has some incredibly talented composers on it that I really respect a lot. I lean a lot here too myself! :!:


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## lucky909091 (Jan 9, 2015)

Really good work, Andrew. I like your piano suites very much.

I would appreciate if you would tell us the VSTi which you used in your tracks.


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## Andrew Souter (Jan 9, 2015)

Harry @ Thu Jan 08 said:


> I'm a new convert to Aether. I would also be really interested to know how you (Andrew) used your plugins on your piano sound. Very nice pieces.




For my solo piano material I have so far used mostly Breeze and B2? Why? Simply b/c when I started working on the "The Idea Of You" project, we were doing the development of Breeze, so I was trying to "kill two birds with one stone" and do composition and reverb field testing at the same time. :oops: 

Then as things progressed the same thing happened with B2. So I became obsessed with making piano presents for B2.

My latest throughs are to use very dense presets in B2 with high energy in the early phase, with less energy in the tail to give a very intimate feeling. This tends to work well with medium to fast tempo pieces with lots of dynamic changes, and delicate passages.

As I progress I am becoming more and more interested in classical material when it comes to piano, so lately I have been attempt to achieve ultimate realism in my verb/B2 settings. 

This tends to be the close the highest CPU settings possible: XTRM density modes for both A and B engine, and 2x OS. If you look at the impulse response of such settings you will not really see any discreet delays. It is almost instantly a burst of very dense energy for the early energy and then also a very dense tail.

I'm still actively refining the settings in search of the perfect preset, but I think that it actually varries depending on the nature of the piece including its key, tempo, dynamics, etc.

I'll try to give some Aether examples in a few days. o-[][]-o


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## Andrew Souter (Jan 9, 2015)

lucky909091 @ Fri Jan 09 said:


> Really good work, Andrew. I like your piano suites very much.
> 
> I would appreciate if you would tell us the VSTi which you used in your tracks.




Thanks my friend!

I've been using Ivory II American D. It's amazing IMHO!

I bought a Kawai VPC-1 to control it. I obsessively customized the velocity curve to get the correct feel for my playing. I went as far as going to Home Depot and getting various weights to drop on the keys to be sure velocity was translated accurately. (o) 

I think until I can afford an actual Steinway D, this is a really unbeatable combination. :!:


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## pixel (Jan 11, 2015)

Thank you Andrew  I'll try it today. 
I don't need realistic reverb this time  I'm a fan of huge unnatural reverbs.
Thanks for explanation of how and why you set up it like that. 

I will take a look on Ivory II. I love my Galaxy Vintage D but it's a little bit difficult to play for me. Mayve I should try different velocity curves - good idea


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## Andrew Souter (Jan 12, 2015)

pixel @ Sun Jan 11 said:


> Thank you Andrew  I'll try it today.
> I don't need realistic reverb this time  I'm a fan of huge unnatural reverbs.



Then you should check out this one:

https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter/an ... th-purpose

:mrgreen: 

I like both myself.

It's just that for me personally for my solo piano trilogy ( of which I have 1 and 2 more or less completed) I purposefully tried to focus on the musical elements and not rely on studio magic so much. This was just a creative decision on my behalf in part to keep me sane and human after spending so much time doing highly technical things like reverb algorithm development and sci-fi sound-design etc.

of course i do love me some freaky sci-fi ambient atmospheres too:

https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter/sets/wayfarer

:mrgreen: 



pixel @ Sun Jan 11 said:


> Thanks for explanation of how and why you set up it like that.
> 
> I will take a look on Ivory II. I love my Galaxy Vintage D but it's a little bit difficult to play for me. Maybe I should try different velocity curves - good idea



No prob. Hope it helps.

Having the right velocity curve to suite your playing is critical IMHO...


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## pixel (Jan 12, 2015)

Andrew Souter @ Mon Jan 12 said:


> Then you should check out this one:
> 
> https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter/an ... th-purpose
> 
> :mrgreen:



I like it  
I love to improvise with huge reverbs like this.



> It's just that for me personally for my solo piano trilogy ( of which I have 1 and 2 more or less completed) I purposefully tried to focus on the musical elements and not rely on studio magic so much. This was just a creative decision on my behalf in part to keep me sane and human after spending so much time doing highly technical things like reverb algorithm development and sci-fi sound-design etc.



Same here. I like to tweak and create new sounds but it's for electronic music. For my piano project I would like to focus only on composing


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## Harry (Jan 13, 2015)

Andrew Souter @ Fri Jan 09 said:


> Harry @ Thu Jan 08 said:
> 
> 
> > I'm a new convert to Aether. I would also be really interested to know how you (Andrew) used your plugins on your piano sound. Very nice pieces.
> ...



Thank you - if you find the time for that it will be most appreciated.


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