Live's reverb sounds like an indoor swimming pool

[dj_blueprint]

I've finally nailed it on the head, Live's reverb has always had a *color* to it and after going swimming in an indoor pool this past weekend, I finally heard that distinct reverb sound from general reverb from various noises in the poolroom. Stuff sounded just like I inserted the plug-in right into the swimming pool room. lol

/cool story

[Khazul]

Well like most reverbs, you have to tweak it to taste, and often consider post EQ.

Even Aether sounds like in indoor swimming pool area (and probably a more realistic one too :p) if you dont tweak it for what you need.

[dum]

I've finally nailed it on the head, Live's reverb has always had a *color* to it

and that colour is BROWN

Brownish green in fact. Like a sick dog's colon custard.

[3phase]

i would enjoy if it would sound a little wetter

[elxicano]

I got Reverberate, but it seems to be associated with crashes, so I might go back to Live's Reverb.

Email the developer (Matt - If I remember right...) and he's quick for making adjustments. I do have to say that I've never had crashes with Reverberate on Mac or PC in any of my various hosts. For me it's got to be one of the most stable plugins I've used (and one of the most updated too).

Still, I wouldn't compare a convolution reverb with a algorithmic reverb too much... I personally think you need both for various situations, and there are just some nice things you can do with convo that you can't do with an algo reverb (like using synthetic pitched IR's).



As for the pool sound, yeah pretty much all algo reverbs will do this at some point, but thanks to some posts from Sean Costello (valhallaDSP and creator of the algo for Eos), the trick is to watch the diffusion settings, especially on smaller spaced settings. High diffusion on a small space can create a very tin like feel to the sound.

Aether of course does this too, but there are several algorithms to choose from, and if replicating a small space is needed, make sure to use ones like the Close setting (which is the picture with woman whispering into the man's ear). There's some other ones to choose from too, but I'm just giving a quick example.

[Sly One]

Only vaguely relevant, but interesting:

A friend of mine who worked as an engineer in studios in the 70s, before decent hardware reverbs were commonplace (beyond springs) told me about one studio where there was an entire (huge!) room that they used for reverb. There were speakers and a mic in there and they simply positioned them to taste, then sent stuff through the speakers and recorded what came off the mic.

He described it as looking like "an upside-down swimming pool".

The real world sounds jangly a lot of the time. Smooth tails tend to be the preserve of algorithmic reverb and specially-designed acoustic environments.

[Simbosan]

*quiet voice* I quite like Ableton reverb, lovely long heavenly tails. Sometimes you can almost hear voices in it. Probably too much Hillage and funny cigarettes during my formative years. But I do, I like it.

S

[MPGK]

*quiet voice* I quite like Ableton reverb, lovely long heavenly tails. Sometimes you can almost hear voices in it. Probably too much Hillage and funny cigarettes during my formative years. But I do, I like it.

Yeah, me too.
Depending on what sound you want to achieve, I guess there could be better choices than the Live device. There's just no jack-of-all-trades when it comes to reverb. As a sound effect rather than a mixing tool, Live's reverb is great.

[luddy]

I really like it for instrument tracks of various kinds, but haven't had as much luck with it on vocals. Sometimes I've been able to make it work OK on a vocal, but almost always I think that Aether or something else gives a better result.

It's such a luxury, too, to be able to instantiate so many instances of it. You can tweak each instance for the single sound being fed to it instead of trying to manage multiple sends to a single shared reverb. Pretty useful plug-in.

Tarekith has mentioned this before, but the thing actually sounds good in low-quality mode, sometimes better for a certain use than the higher-quality modes. Like having a couple different algorithms available.

-Luddy

[elxicano]

Only vaguely relevant, but interesting:

A friend of mine who worked as an engineer in studios in the 70s, before decent hardware reverbs were commonplace (beyond springs) told me about one studio where there was an entire (huge!) room that they used for reverb. There were speakers and a mic in there and they simply positioned them to taste, then sent stuff through the speakers and recorded what came off the mic.

He described it as looking like "an upside-down swimming pool".

The real world sounds jangly a lot of the time. Smooth tails tend to be the preserve of algorithmic reverb and specially-designed acoustic environments.

Who knows, maybe it's extremely relevant... In the book Sound FX: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects, they describe a lot of high-end studios as having similar rooms. For all we know, Ableton Live's reverb could have been modeled after one of them.

I definitely agree that there's a usefulness for every type of reverb. The first time I used Live's reverb, I hated it and then began a quest for a perfect reverb and now I have several choices, but I simply have come to the conclusion... different reverbs for different situations.

[Angstrom]

Only vaguely relevant, but interesting:
A friend of mine who worked as an engineer in studios in the 70s, before decent hardware reverbs were commonplace (beyond springs) told me about one studio where there was an entire (huge!) room that they used for reverb. There were speakers and a mic in there and they simply positioned them to taste, then sent stuff through the speakers and recorded what came off the mic.
He described it as looking like "an upside-down swimming pool".
The real world sounds jangly a lot of the time. Smooth tails tend to be the preserve of algorithmic reverb and specially-designed acoustic environments.

In the 1960s my grandad used to play trumpet in a 'Big Band' which would record in the BBC studios. He said the reverb was basically just a big metal tank up on the hill away from the studio building. A speaker and mic were set up in there to play and recapture a reverbed signal. Kids used to go up and throw rocks at the tank whenever they would do a live broadcast, adding enormous booming reverberant crashes to the radio shows.
Someone should add this feature to their retro-reverb. "Pesky kids mode"

[Sly One]

That's awesome LOL.

[glitchrock-buddha]

I like it sometimes in Eco mode. High quality mode is where it tends to get tinny I find.

[anybody human]

I bought a couple of the partner instruments, the electronic drums one (which is good but I like making my own drums) and the east village piano (which is fantastic but CPU hungry). Both of them surprised me with their excellent use of Live's reverb, the drum livepack even has all the reverbs in a folder to use elsewhere. On a side note, they set up drumracks in a really cool way w/ saturation, compression & reverb. In both cases, I didn't know Live's reverb could sound so good, really effective on instruments, esp. individual drums, synths, piano/keys etc. I've been using it a lot more now.

For vocals (& maybe guitar) it's probably not ideal, but a lot can be achieved by putting an eq before & after. A friend was mixing vocals in Pro Tools, like a lot of people he still uses their crappy D-Verb out of habit even tho he has nicer reverbs, I put an eq after shape it a bit & he was really surprised what a difference eq'ing a reverb can make.

[3phase]

lives reverb has the same 2 dimensional grainy sound as the rest of the software.. probably samplerate conversion/BHD related...
While this is not so audiable in a saturator it hurts the reverb tails.

So you need to make the tails disappaer early.. what is a problem for bigger rooms.
2 dimensional sounding bigger rooms? that hurts my brain somehow.
So its ctually best to use with cutting the highs in the I and O and having it just mixed in a little..best on each channel or groups individual.. than you can make it sound quite expensiv.. so you need 4-6 of them in high quality mode to achive what one lexicon 300 achives via a send..
.
stacking multiple reverbs in a rack with saturators and bit crushers can do some nice dub fx...
but than.. its a cpu hog again for fx the cheapest footstomp reverbs gives you...

in short..its good that it is there.. in case you quickly need some reverb... while in production you find easily something you might prefer.. so its not really state of the art.. has somehow the status of emagics silver verb.. you only use to safe some cpu.. but problem with abletons reverb..its not very cpu friendly..
I can open more space designers in logic on my machine than ableton reverbs in high quality mode..


It would be actually good when live sees a one better reverb.. and the exsisting one somehow more cpu friendly.. seems that there are some tricks to save cpu cycles on reverb creation ableton is not aware of yet.. or maybe having 3 reverbs.. one really cheap as building block for rack creation..the standard one for legacy reasons.. and a comprehensiv top model that can eat some cpu..but you only need one master room anyway..

Lets face it.. the biggest studios in the world have maybe 2 big reverb generators in their racks..
but not 20.. as the usual digi boy of today seems to need ...