Ableton Forum

leedsquietman wrote: IK's Classik reverb is worth a demoing if you want a nice reverb that sounds a bit lexiconish which isn't a convolution reverb.

jepp.

+1 for Zrev. I also use Live reverb and think it is fine (on high quality only, though). I like my tools simple. Interesting thread though.

Hey Bounce, you work for Altiverb or something ...

I never said it wasn't a great reverb, just that it was high on CPU use. I should have said that v4 and 5 are the ones I've used before, but big fucking deal if I haven't used 6 yet, I was not trying to misinform anyone. I did add that all reverbs hit the CPU somewhat. Chillax bro..

And if Alti's new reverb is less intensive then great. The pricing is still not great, although for Mac there is not too many other choices. As a PC VST I would still buy Voxengo's Pristine Space which is great and have money left over to buy several other vsts.

is there any official statement about the reverb being mono?

Angstrom wrote:

ethios4 wrote:

Angstrom wrote:1: play a mono wave on a track, put a utility on that track.
2: now on a return channel - put a live reverb with a long decay and set to wet 100%
3: now send the wave to the reverb - hear a big reverb yes?
4: press the phase invert button on one side of the utility.
5: reverb disapeared?

Just reading through this....wouldn't the reverb disappear because you cancelled the original mono wave by inverting one side of a mono track?
.

hi,
no, it' not that.
the track doesn't intelligently send 'as mono', In Live's internal bussing it's sent as a stereo signal (to preserve pot panning), the reverb then receives L = -Mono R=+mono and should (in a stereo effect) process both of those individually before passing them to the chorusing dept. It should not sum them and then attempt to process.

anyway - I forgot, there's a better demonstration:

1: get ANY wave, stereo / mono / whatever ... no need for a utility
2: send it to the same big reverb as before (100% wet) turn off all chorus and spin. stereo set to 100 (default)
3: pan the origin channel hard left and right

the reverb stays central. I think the reverb is mono

further tests to eliminate the pan pot (ie are sends post fader pre pan pot?)

1: take a stereo test wave which is first 100% right, then 100% left (I re-sampled a drum loop hard panning 1 bar left, 1 bar right )
2: play back the re-sampled panning wave, send it to the reverb
3: set the reverb send as 'prefade'
4: turn down the panning wave and listen to the reverb

the mono signal is still evident from a hard panning origin, despite eliminating as much of the track signal chain as possible.

I think it's a mono reverb

I found out when I did the following:

put the autopan in one channel to have your audio fading fully from the left to the right.

listen to it.

now put the reverb behind that. gosh - mono.

sorry to dig up an old thread but i didnt think i needed a new topic.

the altiverb is making everything sound muddy to me. it changes the sound dramatically..

am i doing something wrong? can anyone help?

shredfusion wrote:sorry to dig up an old thread but i didnt think i needed a new topic.

the altiverb is making everything sound muddy to me. it changes the sound dramatically..

am i doing something wrong? can anyone help?

I made a mix a while back and decided to throw altiverb in on a few parts, at the time I thought it sounded awesome but later I realised it made those parts pop out way too much and they became semi ear piercing for some reason. not really a fault of the plug I guess but I just really didn't like the sound I got at the time.

i might have run into that too,

i was working on a voice composition, all sound designed with altiverb on every track. i dont know how to describe what was wrong with the sound because im new with recording but it sounded very unpleasant, like bad frequencies, too bassy. i think i should use a new reverb.

my problem with altiverb was more like high frequences just screaming through the mix, I didn't notice them at the time of mixing but later it kinda heart my ears and I could tell it was whatever I did with altiverb

You really need to work with the damping and eq, the send level and Altiverb's output to tailor the reverb to the material. Don't drown the source in reverb, apply in smaller doses, generally.

Changing the subject a bit, but does anyone have some favorite free reverbs that sound good? Someone mentioned SIR and Glaceverb....

Someone mentioned lately to go hardware on reverb for better quality/better value. An MX 400 ( lexicon) was mentioned. Anybody use one of these babies?

polyslax wrote:You really need to work with the damping and eq, the send level and Altiverb's output to tailor the reverb to the material. Don't drown the source in reverb, apply in smaller doses, generally.

alright ill try that, thank you. i was pretty much drenching everything in it, because it sounds good at the time, but it ends up sounding like bad production.

I love the 'Freeze' button...

A comment in regards of the "mono reverb" discussion:

Yes, it is correct that the input of the reverb simply sums up the left and right channel. But this does not imply that the output is mono as well.
A lot of reverb algorithms basically take a mono input signal, use a series of allpass filters to create the first reflections and a feedback diffusion network for the actual reverb tail. Allready the first reflections are individually panned to create the impression of more or less realistic room geometries and individually filtered as a function of distance (time) and level. These panned reflections are in a second stage feed into a true stereo FDN and this is what comes out. A "mono" reverb would output a single channel of reverb. Using a true stereo input would make sense for more realistic room simulations but also would increase CPU load significantly and the improvement on most sources is not very big. The reverb was build for Live 1.5 in 2001. At this time CPU was a big concern and we decided to go for the quite common mono -> stereo approach.

A totaly different issue is the bug that the stereo width control affected the stereo width of the dry part of the input signal. This bug has been solved for Live 6.

Since the best way to achive realistic room simmulations nowaday is convolution and not other method even comes close if you want to have realistic reverbs we decided not to put much effort into making the Live reverb sound extremly naturalistic. We focused on achving a dense and pleasing reverb tail and the capability of creating interesting reverb sounds with it. However, at some point we might either add a new reverb or significantly improve the existing one.

Some ideas how to make more out of the exisiting reverb:

1. The default setting of the Spin parameter is not perfect. More realistic reverbs can be achived by placing the ball in the spin 2D view closer to the left bottom.

2. to build a true stereo reverb with two independent inputs use a rack with two chains of the reverb, place a utility before each reverb and set one to "left" input and the other one to "right". Place a second utility after the reverb and pan one to the left and the other to the right. Finally add an EQ 8 sfter the reverb, set it to MS mode and EQ the mid and side bands differently and you'll get a complete new reverb experience.

3. also consider filtering of the reverb by placing an EQ before it or putting two reverbs in series, where the frist one is set to produce a very small and short room while the second one makes a big room with a long reverb tail.

There are many ways to achive very unique and fresh sounding reverbs even with the old Live 1.5 reverb, just experiment a bit.

And if you want a convincing concert hall, Alitverb would be my first choice too.

Robert