I wonder if you could get a bunch of impulse responses and crossfade between them based on input level/spectrum, with any glitching covered up by a small output buffer. That’s not unheard of, older Acustica plugins did something kind of like that right?
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@bfk As @Manton wrote, Shaperbox is awesome and does a lot of stuff without having to build complicated effect racks.
But Pro-R is also really nice for a creative reverb - you can use an EQ-like curve to set frequency-specific reverb length…
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This is super interesting, like building a wavetable of IRs and then interpolate through them like scanning from a sine to a saw.
I guess the question is does (0.5 * small room.wav) * (0.5 * big room.wav) get you some approximation of medium room. Because if it does, and I don’t seen why it couldn’t, the rest is just wavetable stuff fed into a convolver (though sizing might be a little weird, I’ll have to think on that).
I could see a use case outside of standard room decay impulse responses (which I think would likely behave as you described), where you use literally anything as your IR and crossfade between. This could make for some unique sound effects!
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I agree 100%. This is ripe for all sorts of hijinx.
What I’m actually thinking is about a process often called a wave terrain, which is like stacks of wavetables that you can navigate in multiple dimensions, like x/y with a joystick or pad or similar (though not restricted to that).
That would allow for simple things like positioning in a room, but you could also use it to transition between spaces (up/down is big/small, left/right changes the absorption coefficient, etc), or even wildly different system depending on which IRs you use.
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I was thinking wave terrain type thing too.
In my mind, I want the sound to pitch and fade naturally towards a narrow band of mid frequencies. I want some control over the texture and exact pitch of that end state, but the sound needs to be able to get there from a variety of different starting states. Like, a sine needs to slowly modulate into other frequencies that the reverb can grab onto. Conversely, a full range noise blast should slowly filter down. So a single path (like a wavetable) would not be able to apply to all situations.
The plugin needs to be able to do something like Izotope IIRC in limiting, where it can use a lookup table to look at the level and frequency content of the incoming audio and from there determine which impulse response needs to be accessed in order to go towards the desired output. Essentially, the controls would just be setting what the end state looks like and some parameters that determine how quickly and smooth or random the transition is from the start state to the end state.
It may also need a built-in pitch shifter if you have, for example, a very low frequency element (like a tri sub) being fed in and the desired end state is a 40 second plate reverb with an 18 db/oct band pass centered at 1.8k. Nothing would make it to that end state. So, subtly, we’d have to add some noise and/or pitch shift the original sound up into that range in order to have sound at all.
Oh, and every time a new sound is pumped in, it ideally needs to morph naturally back to the correct starting state.
The more I talk about it, this is kind of like making a heat death reverb, where everything inevitably goes towards just noise sitting in a feedback loop. The question is how long and what path you take to get there. And then how does it respond to new energy? Does that pile on top of the existing sound, or can we dump old audio out fast enough to make way for a pristine new sound?
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Most of the time I just reach for Pro-R, but I really like all the ideas here. I love wavetable synths with multiple morph features, so that might be something additional to add…
Also, @White_Noise writing about the heat death reverb kinda reminded me of the “musical” reverbs that go in the direction of emphasizing specific notes and scales. I’m a bit sad that I missed the free giveaway of Temperance Lite a few weeks ago… It seems to be a bit similar to Adaptiverb, but based on a different method and with some special tricks.
https://www.eventideaudio.com/plug-ins/temperance-pro/
Combining something like Pro-R and Scaler EQ might be interesting, too…
So the idea of treating an IR like a wavetable is a no-go. It would have been obvious if I’d thought about how convolution works - every sample of the effected signal is multiplied by the entire IR, meaning the algorithm has to know what the IR is beforehand.
There is potentially a way around this – you can load up two or more IRs in separate convolution chains, feed the signal through all of them and live mix the outputs in the same way you’d mix the waveforms of a wave table. The hangup I see is that convolution is computationally expensive and running a bunch of them in parallel will probably start eating your CPU like you’re stacking RePro-1s. When my plate clears a bit I’ll do some testing and see how viable it is.
I kind of figured best case was that this would be pretty memory bandwidth intensive in order to keep dozens, if not hundreds, of IRs ready to load in real time.
I think this is unique enough that we could justify a rack mount unit if it can do this with the reverb as well as some of the other FX you and Manton were considering. Studio’s and composers pay for Eventide/Lexicon/Bricasti, if this can do what I picture I think they’d pay for this too.
I swear the darndest thing has happened in the last week where I swear I can hear what’s wrong with every reverb I normally use now 
It’s not some youtube review telling me to check out this sexy new better one either, I don’t watch a lot of gear demos because it leads to a lot of purchases.
I’m working on a new track and started with a preset that had a basic synth reverb on it. Was a bit flat, so I went to disable the built in reverb and add a good one. On this sound, I can hear the flaws with how Pro-R2 does modulation (really noisy, kills the depth) how SP2016 does delay taps (very obvious early reflections even in the most distant modes). I’m interested to try more plugins on this sound now because there have been times in the past where I didn’t think these two reverbs were very good/the best option. But I’ve never put these on a sound and thought they were BAD like this. I’ve apparently accidentally found a killer benchmark.
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Bingo.
Does it all, doesn’t require modular synthesis, no weird aftertaste™
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This actually seems cool as hell. I wonder how such a thing would handle the buffer-clearing; maybe crossfading / interpolating back to normal? Seems somewhat similar to that weird UA reverb plugin (I can’t remember which it was) that responds interactively / deterministically to the incoming audio, likely based on some sort of large-scale LUT.
If you got some free time on your hands at some point and get bored, maybe upload a quick demonstration of that. Not that I would argue that Pro-R2 is always the best or something like that, you just made it sound really interesting.
On another note, I got Temperance “2nd hand” on KVR for 8€ (yeah, I know that I have a bad case of GAS, more about that in another thread in a minute lol)… It’s nice, I’m playing around with pushing some “notes” on one sound and diminishing them on another and I like what I’m hearing so far…
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This has reverb turnt up so that it comes through clearer. I hear this much more on my Audeze than I do my AKGs.
Sound is:
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Dry
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Pro R2
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Arturia REV LX 24 (modern highest fi mode)
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Eventide SP 2016 (Modern)
5-8 are 2-4 with a HPF before the reverb inputs.
All have similar settings. In the end I think SP2016 is best, but that one even has a bit more obvious early taps than I wanted in this case. It’s much less noticeable with the levels set to where they actually are in the mix, this is just illustrative of the differences between a couple of hundred dollar reverbs.
You can DL the 32-bit file to check out if you want.
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Thank you very much for upoading the comparison! That’s really interesting! I def agree that Pro-R2 sounds really bad there. It could probably be improved somewhat by adjusting settings, especially the frequency-specific decay length. But from what I’m hearing, I think I like Arturia REV LX24 best.
Nice pluck line btw 
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really enjoy using HOFA IQ-Reverb on sends for a lot of clicks,bleeps, blips, and general “glitch/idm” drums type stuff..
Edit: i also will sometimes use the IQ on a group with glitch cutz just to sortta glue them together in a IR room
bx arua is another i often gravitate towards
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I messed around with the settings and by the time it sounds better the decay is just too short for what I’m after here.
Totally ok though, there will be other times where R2 comes out on top.
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Now I’m thinking it might be interesting to start a table of recommended Reverb plugins for specific use cases, with rows for the use cases and columns for the producer giving the advice in an open document… Might be interesting to compare and make lists based on it if enough people participate…
Also, that might be interesting for all kinds of plugin types. And fun to fill out - I know from experience that especially GAS-y producers love to talk about their plugins 
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Thanks everybody! When I asked about Crystalline*, I didn’t expect such enthusiasm on the subject of reverb. To be honest, some of the discussion went way over my head**.
My take on reverb is: does it sound alright? yes/no and that’s about it 
*@Manton I ended up not getting it because I wasn’t “wow-ed”. I have the demo and still have to go through the long list of presets. Maybe I’ll do that and get it when it’s on sale again at some point in the future.
** @White_Noise U wot m8? I could read this all day and still have no idea what this means 
Are you talking about putting reverb on a sub bass? If so, why?
Back on topic:
YES PLEASE!
I should have mentioned that I was looking at reverb for use on vocals. I’ve started recording vocals again (for the first time in 25 years!) and I have no clue what works best - I just go with “OK, this sounds alright and doesn’t make the voice seem disconnected from the rest of the music”.
Any practical tips and/or recommendations on using (what) reverb (type) with vocals layered on top of busy electronic music or how you guys do it would be spectacular.
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I caved and got myself the Mercury X. It came in last night. My short impressions so far: holy fuckknuckles - this thing good. You know that reverb that fades to infinite noise I wanted? That shit is a preset in here. Preset 8. You know how I wanted a reverb that stays clean by responding dynamically with more than just ducking to my playing? That’s a preset in here. The tweaks I want to make to the character of the reverb to make it my own? They’re all on macros one and two, for like EVERY preset. It’s like if you added 10 years to my knowledge of reverb and then made the exact thing I wanted, this would be it.
Only downside is I now have to run a hybrid setup for all my tracks to use this while I wait about a decade for them to make a $300 plugin out of it if they go for the strymon strategy.
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