# Pre-delay after Reverb?



## Rowy (Sep 28, 2019)

I am out of my depth here. Although I have used pre-delay and reverb before, I never encountered a situation like this one.

Berlin Woodwinds seemed the right tool for the production of a short bouncy tune for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and contrabassoon. My guess was that the 'room' setting would give me the most natural reverb. It probably did, but even at 100 % it is meager. Besides, the stereo isn't really impressive, although I used pan to get at least a somewhat wider sound.

Now I don't know what to do. Is it possible to add (pre-)delay _after_ reverb? Or could I add a bit of reverb with a plugin? Reverb on reverb might not be such a good idea. And then there's the depth of the audio. There hardly is any depth. So I need to add that too.

I read a post about the 'Haas'-effect. I tried that, but I didn't like the result. There must be a more sophisticated method. Or else I have to mix first without any reverb and than ad the reverb of my choice, for instance FabFilter Pro-R. But then again, why make a 'room' setting?


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## VinRice (Sep 28, 2019)

Short answer, do whatever you want, if it sounds good it is good.

Long answer, don't add delay after reverb unless the reverb is quite short and you like the effect (its fun for pop production). You can certainly add reverb however. The Room sound _is_ the pre-delay. Reverb is by its nature chaotic. Chaotic plus chaotic is just chaotic. (random + random = random, not more random).

Every commercial soundtrack you have ever heard has artificial reverb added to the original sound.

Also, worry about the composition not the reverb. 1000 times more important.


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## re-peat (Sep 28, 2019)

Trying to create a fitting and acceptable space around your instruments, Rowy, is going to be a whole lot easier if you address a few performance and programming issues first. The main reason why what you have at the moment sounds quite unconvincing, is not so much the absence of a believable space (although that doesn't help), but because everything sounds quantized and dead and there is no musicality in the performance whatsoever.

Correct these things first, and you’ll discover that adding reverb to the lot is going to be much less of a problem. Seriously, the stronger the performance you can simulate with your samples, the easier it becomes to finish the track with the right spatialization and whatever production treatment that may be required.

*Here*’s a little something I quickly made with almost the same instruments as you’re using: the oboe, 2 clarinets and bassoon from the Berlin Woodwinds. Instead of the contrabassoon though, I used a second clarinet.

Couldn’t be bothered with loading the multi-articulations for these instruments even though that would have greatly improved the performance. But this being just a quick and rough excercise — and not one about performance/programming techniques or sample handling, but about spatialization — I only used the staccatos.

And just for the sake of this excercise, I also decided to work with only the Close mic’s — usually a very bad idea, I find, but it does add to the challenge — and tried to create some decent width and depth with a simple stereo tool (from HOFA) and 2 reverb plugins: (1) the Eventide SP2016, which I used to suggest some ambience around each instrument and create different ‘planes of depth’ and (2) the ReLab Sonsig, to add a mere a hint of space around the summed signal. In other words: each instrument has its own HOFA panner (inserted before the reverb) as well its own SP2016, and the four tracks together have an additional faint amount of Sonsig space.

(By the way, you don't need the plugins I'm using. Any half-decent alternative will do about just as well.)

To illustrate the process in more detail: *here*’s a fragment of how the thing sounds _'au naturel'_: as dry as BWW allows things to sound, and with no panning or anything else applied to it. And *this* is the same fragment with the panning in place (using the HOFA). This *next clip* adds to the previous one by introducing the SP2016’s (as I said, one for each instrument) and, finally, *this clip* also has the Sonsig inserted in the StereoOut.

I don’t know if you can hear it, but the idea was to have the oboe flanked by the two clarinets (ever so slightly behind the oboe) and have the bassoon sit behind the three others. In a not-too-small and not-too-reverberant chamber.

(The panning of the clarinets is a bit extreme, I find, but I did that only to better illustrate the technique.)

What also always helps when you’re rendering a mock woodwind performance, is to sprinkle some samples of woodwind key-clicks over the tracks. Proceed with taste and restraint though, otherwise it'll sound silly.

So:
(1) Before anything else, first get the music and the performance as good as you can make them. This is, by some distance, the most important thing.
(2) Don’t overthink or overcomplicate reverb. Learn your tools of choice first, and then simply add some reverb. It’s dead easy. Honestly.
(3) Don’t believe everything you read in reverb-related threads. Few subjects invite more nonsense, pseudo-expertise and ill-informed drivel than reverb and spatialization, thereby making the topic much more confusing and bewildering than it really is.

_


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## Rowy (Sep 29, 2019)

VinRice said:


> The Room sound _is_ the pre-delay.



Wow, that's a real eye-opener. Thanks, VinRice.


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## Rowy (Sep 29, 2019)

re-peat said:


> *Here*’s a little something I quickly made with almost the same instruments as you’re using: the oboe, 2 clarinets and bassoon from the Berlin Woodwinds. Instead of the contrabassoon though, I used a second clarinet.
> 
> Couldn’t be bothered with loading the multi-articulations for these instruments even though that would have greatly improved the performance. But this being just a quick and rough excercise — and not one about performance/programming techniques or sample handling, but about spatialization — I only used the staccatos.
> 
> And just for the sake of this excercise, I also decided to work with only the Close mic’s — usually a very bad idea, I find, but it does add to the challenge — and tried to create some decent width and depth with a simple stereo tool (from HOFA) and 2 reverb plugins: (1) the Eventide SP2016, which I used to suggest some ambience around each instrument and create different ‘planes of depth’ and (2) the ReLab Sonsig, to add a mere a hint of space around the summed signal. In other words: each instrument has its own HOFA panner (inserted before the reverb) as well its own SP2016, and the four tracks together have an additional faint amount of Sonsig space.



Many thanks, re-peat, for your lecture on music production. I agree with you about the 'performance'. I should have added to my post that I always try to get the technique right, when I start with a new orchestration, before I produce the music. I just got stuck on the reverb.

Your example sounded exactly like I prefer it. And I know now that I should go with the 'close' mic. But first I'm going to study your reply and let the matter sink in. Once again, thank you very much.


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