# Anechoic stems of classical music - an interesting experiment for your reverb setup



## muk (May 13, 2017)

Hi everyone,

here is a repository of some classical music that was recorded in an anechoic chamber, each instrument/section separately:

http://research.cs.aalto.fi/acousti...ment-and-analysis/85-anechoic-recordings.html

Couldn't that be a nice to test to hear how 'dry sound plus artificial panning and reverb' compares to 'recorded in a concert hall/studio'? It's maybe more of a fun experiment than an actual real life test for our reverb setups, but it could be interesting non the less. I'd be curious to hear how these stems sound spatialized with Vienna MIR, and IRCAM Spat specifically. But any other tools/setup are interesting as well.


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## Phryq (May 13, 2017)

Ok, well here's mine from the other thread,



I'm noticing a lot of noise, though I guess that's not the most important thing.

Now I'm playing with the Mahler; it's a lot of fun. Simply changing the room in Altiverb is like "wow, I'm in another room now".


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## Beat Kaufmann (May 13, 2017)

Hello
Mozart-Mix without effects (just panned)
Mozart-Mix with effects

Mixed the piece only with a bit of convolution and algo reverb.
Used...

30 Minuts for removing noises (very bad mp3 files with very very low volumes and a lot of noise) 

30 Minutes for the mix.
Have fun
Beat
___________________________________________________________________________
By the way: I would never record a classical peace this way (each instrument obviously recorded removed from any other... further also in mono. This is a nogo at least for the soloist (my opinion).
For comparing an excerpt from a real recording of mine...

*Edit:*

I added just a little bit more reverb over all (Mozart-Mix with effects). The original mix was obviously too dry for some listeners.
I deleted the noisy overtones of the singer and reconstructed it with iZotopes Exciter.


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## muk (May 13, 2017)

Oh dear, the audio quality is poor indeed, and so is the performance. But it should still be reasonable for our purpose. 

Phryq, in your attempt everything sounds quite far away. Did you push it back specifically, or is it something the Altiverb IR did? Also I think the singer should be a bit more focused, as she would be standing in front of the orchestra (or above the orchestra pit if an opera performance).

Beat, your mix is quite close in comparison, and there is a lot of dry signal in it. Did you apply reverb on each stem, or one summing reverb on the 2bus, or both? In a recording such a close perspective could be possible I guess, but not in a live performance. To me it sounds more like a conductor perspective than an audience seat.


Here is what my setup spat out:

https://app.box.com/s/gtpu4mhbtirhgrjpsy5y4jef2ly6thx4

There would be a lot of tweaking to be done to improve the result. To my ears this is no comparison to an actual recording in a hall. Hard to tell how much it is the pannings/reverbs fault, and how much is because of the recording. 

Phryq, what do you think? Does it made you change your mind about anechoic strings or do you find the results acceptable?

Still looking forward for MIR and Spat versions if anybody is willing to do them.


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## pmcrockett (May 13, 2017)

I'll maybe give this a shot this weekend with the Spat presets I use to imitate the EW Hollywood libraries' mics. Should be interesting.


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## rottoy (May 13, 2017)

Here's my run with ValhallaRoom.
https://instaud.io/WyT


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## clisma (May 13, 2017)

And here's a version with Flux Spat for ERs on group busses, and Flux Verb on 2-buss for Reverb. Warning: it's my lazy day, don't read too much into this...

http://www.download.lukelife.com/MiTradi-Mozart.mp3


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## Phryq (May 14, 2017)

I just slapped an Altiverb on a track send, with everything going to it equally. I used a long (18m) IR, which is why everything sounds so far. I wanted to hear a bit more tail in the pauses, but that would have better been accomplished with an algo-verb I think.

I was just going for a bit of a purist approach, and it ended up sounding like the only seats I can afford 

These other versions I like better than mine. Agreed the singer sounds better drier, though realistically, if you're sitting far back, she would be just as wet as the rest of the orchestra.

Maybe I should go with a tree-mic sound (instead of sitting in the back of the hall). I'm curious, if an anechoic orchestra were recorded with tree-mics, would it sound any better? 

Here's a recording of some Greek music using a binaural head!
http://acustica.ing.unife.it/eng-ver/ricerche-eng/Recordings/ERATO/Odysseus_KU100_LR.flac

Hard to compare with orchestral music though.

Anyhow, I do like the sound of these. Is it the best recording I've ever heard? No. But that would be comparing low-grade mp3s to... the best recording I've ever heard. Sounds way better than Orchestral Tools mockups, but again not a fair comparison.

Hard to say if I could pass a blind test. I imagine I could, but... we all know how those blind tests go


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## muk (May 14, 2017)

Nice results everyone! These are very useable I would say. The ValhallaRoom example sounds slightly veiled, but other than that very nice. Spat sounds clear and nice. And Proximity does a great job at pushing things back a little. Very nice tool.

Generally for the winds and the voice the results sound quite good. Anechoic recording with the addition of artificial reverb seems to work quite well for these. The strings, however, do sound slightly worse. These sound like recorded too close, and then reverb slapped on. Incidentally this coincides with many peoples opinion about VSL's silent stage products. The winds are often held in high esteem, the strings less so.

Here is another version with my setup. It sounds much clearer now and I like it much better overall than my v1:

https://app.box.com/s/z5xqw0jmp1geqx55srx10zh3j4b8v291


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## Beat Kaufmann (May 14, 2017)

muk said:


> ...Beat, your mix is quite close in comparison, and there is a lot of dry signal in it. Did you apply reverb on each stem, or one summing reverb on the 2bus, or both? In a recording such a close perspective could be possible I guess, but not in a live performance. To me it sounds more like a conductor perspective than an audience seat.



Hi Muk
Thanks for your feedback.
*
A Matter of Taste*
It shows once more that mixing a sound is a matter of taste. Further, it depends whether you like to reproduce a "real situation" or a situation which people are used to when they listen to music (mp3, CD,...) in a car or everywhere else. Also: In the 80ties was a huge amount of reverb a must. Nowadays we have more the opposit situation specially with easy listening music. 

*MIR and Co*
Since we have "mixing machines" such as MIR and others, sample-mixers are used to put their music into these boxes and that's it. Because the default settings often offer a lot of room and reverb the users are used to this very "far away sound" so that sampled orchestras "need" to sound this way for being mixed OK. What ever the situation may be we have no right and false here it is always a matter of taste.

*My taste*
A soloist should be a soloist and I always prefer to sit in row 1 - 4 in a concert and not on the balcony.
I made a mix which represents my taste:

The soloist in front
Strings Woodwinds Depth 1
Horns Depth 2
Beat


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## Phryq (May 14, 2017)

Just to be clear; I also didn't like my version. I personally prefer drier-than-natural and wider-than-natural, though I do of course love hearing live orchestras for classical (Romantic) music.

I also like the sound of harsh-baroque strings. I remember loving the sound of LASS, even without a lot of verb, though I do remember some people pulling off a silky/smooth sound with it. I never could, because bow-noise would build up as I added reverb.

Brass of course needs a special ER treatment to get rid of the farting-sounds. I think strings need the same to make them silky.


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## Beat Kaufmann (May 14, 2017)

Phryq said:


> Just to be clear; I also didn't like my version. I personally prefer drier-than-natural and wider-than-natural, though I do of course love hearing live orchestras for classical (Romantic) music.
> I also like the sound of harsh-baroque strings.



If you want to have soloists (or what ever) closer than the orchestra mix it with a separate instance of Altiverb, MIR or what ever. You can bring out the soloist much more better.


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## Phryq (May 14, 2017)

I'm thinking that with woodwinds, we tend to (naturally) hear more of the direct sound, as they have more high frequency content (high pitched instruments like flutes, or lots of overtones with the double reeds). HF are more directional that LF, and therefore we hear more early reflections on the LF, and more direct sound on the HF.

On the other hand, reverb on LF creates mud.

So maybe it's best to have an ER, or just a couple delays on the LF / Brass / Strings, then a tail with a high-pass on it?


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## Alatar (May 14, 2017)

Phryq said:


> I'm thinking that with woodwinds, we tend to (naturally) hear more of the direct sound, as they have more high frequency content (high pitched instruments like flutes, or lots of overtones with the double reeds). HF are more directional that LF, and therefore we hear more early reflections on the LF, and more direct sound on the HF.
> 
> On the other hand, reverb on LF creates mud.
> 
> So maybe it's best to have an ER, or just a couple delays on the LF / Brass / Strings, then a tail with a high-pass on it?



And another thing: The sound radiation of a string instrument, such as a Cello, is very complicated. It is not uniform. Not at all. That means: You actually cannot capture the sound radiation of a Cello, by using just one microphone. You would need several microphones, positioned at different spots in the room.
I think that is the reason, why it is not so easy, to just "slap on" reverb onto an anechoic Cello recording. 

I don't know about woodwinds. But maybe woodwinds have a more uniform sound radiation. That could mean, it could be enough to just use one microphone on e.g. a flute.


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## Phryq (May 14, 2017)

In the anechoic recordings above they used a combo of mics, specific to the radiation of each instrument. It's really too bad they just had those crappy mp3 files. On the site it says you can request uncompressed files.

But then what about recording with tree-mics in the anechoic chamber. Then you get positioning.

Or, a combo of mics, mixed down to either a mono or dual-mono sample?


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## muk (May 14, 2017)

Isn't one obvious advantage of anechoic samples exactly the absence of positional cues in the reverb, i. e. that you can pan them freely as you wish?

What happened to ji eff's posts in this thread? I hadn't had the time to listen to his new versions (including the surround example), but was looking forward to it.


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## Vin (May 16, 2017)

Here's a quick pass with just one instance of VSR S24 on a send:

https://instaud.io/WTX


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## Rob (May 16, 2017)

while I can understand having single instruments for woodwinds brass and percussion, why have they recorded only one instrument for each strings section? It's just impossible to get the right sound of the orchestra with a string sextet doing the part of a 50 or so string section. Talking about the Mahler here...


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## Phryq (May 16, 2017)

Ya, in a number of ways, this isn't ideal material... I'll dig and see if there's anything else available.

This would be a fun idea for a competition.


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## Saxer (May 16, 2017)

Rob said:


> while I can understand having single instruments for woodwinds brass and percussion, why have they recorded only one instrument for each strings section? It's just impossible to get the right sound of the orchestra with a string sextet doing the part of a 50 or so string section. Talking about the Mahler here...


Probably the 50 part string section doesn't fit into the anechoic chamber without sticking each others eyes with the bow on fast passages.


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## Rob (May 17, 2017)

Phryq said:


> Ya, in a number of ways, this isn't ideal material... I'll dig and see if there's anything else available.
> 
> This would be a fun idea for a competition.


indeed... and, I wasn't being negative, this is a very interesting thing. I only meant that nobody can make a solo cello play as a section, reverb or not...


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## gregh (May 17, 2017)

pretty much the first time I have tackled something like this - took 90 mins maybe. Mainly used tweaked presets in Reverberate, a little bit of Sparkverb, compression and pitch correction to rein in the vocals a bit, Izotope Nectar and Neutron.
I went through a few different styles - one that was quite dry with the vocals up front that reminded me of an more upfront nelson eddy and jeanette macdonald operetta sound. Then I compared to the other tracks here and went a little larger with the listening position further back. I also thought about the singer on stage and the ensemble in the pit. Not that any of that would come through to anyone else, I have no experience actually doing that commercially or even just seriously, but I really enjoyed thinking about making a spatially located mix in that way.


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## Jacob Cadmus (Feb 9, 2018)

I'm late to the party, but thought I'd take a stab at the Beethoven, Bruckner, and Mahler mixes. I used the Festspielhaus IR in Altiverb and the free M-ST plugin to emulate a stereo field.

Bruckner - https://instaud.io/1L0W

Beethoven - https://instaud.io/1L0V

Mahler - https://instaud.io/1L0X


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## Maxime Luft (Feb 15, 2018)

Nearly 4 in the morning here in Germany and I'm just sitting here, trying to make something out of dry mono stems


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## Andrew Souter (Feb 15, 2018)

Very excellent resource!

a quick pass at Beethoven using only several instances of Breeze 2 and panning. No other processing. I used just one take of each of the parts from the PCM files and did not adjust any levels.


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## MaxOctane (Feb 15, 2018)

Andrew Souter said:


> Very excellent resource!
> 
> a quick pass at Beethoven using only several instances of Breeze 2 and panning. No other processing. I used just one take of each of the parts from the PCM files and did not adjust any levels.




Sounds good. What settings?


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## Andrew Souter (Feb 16, 2018)

I used Flux's Free Stereo Tool to pan each track Pre Breeze insert. Great plug! I did not check, but I assume this is just a gain panner (when applied to mono sources).

I then used many copies of the same Breeze 2 preset "Russian Hall" from the 2.0 factory bank: one on each instrument directly as inserts, post the Flux Stereo Tool.

I made small adjustments to the preset for different instrument groups such as adjusting the Balance control to have a lower value for strings and pretty high value for things in the back of the orchestra such a Brass and Timpani and adjustment to Controls such as Contour and Shape. I may have used Alg Randomize a few times to get a different preset variation of the same idea for more diversity.

If anyone is interested, here is the Cubase project:

http://www.2caudio.com/sitecontent/products/breeze/Beethoven_7th_Mov1_Cubase_Breeze2.zip

I removed the audio files though, bc I was requested not to redistribute the source PCM files. I guess you could plug in the MP3 files, or ask for the PCM files directly from these guys if you don't have them.

And as I said I only used one instrument track for each instrument, so Violin 1 section, is only one player here. I suppose the completely proper thing to do would be to have 16 Violin 1, 16 Violin 2, etc. Maybe I will try that experiment later if time allows. (Edit: I just read the part of the paper, and I see the 22 supplied tracks are 22 different mic positions of the same take, not 22 different takes, so I guess we don't really have sources to try to recreate a one-track-per-player scenario.)

Anyway, it was just a quick test for me to see how well I could create depth with Breeze 2, I am sure you guys could do much better than me!


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