Capturing reverb 'settings' from analogue

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Mark Jones

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Hi, I have a couple of old Alesis Microverbs and I love the SMALL 2 setting to death, mostly for adding a little room sound to drums.

Now that I'm working mostly within a PC with Nuendo and Sound Forge etc, is there any way to find out/define exactly what the parameters of SMALL 2 are and dialling them in?

I've got a couple of old analogue things called ears hanging off my head so I could just approximate till I get close but just wondering how/if these things can be measured/captured...?

Just a thought..
 
See if this scenario might work for you. Run a track through an output of the sound card to the input of the Alesis. Have the reverb set such that it outputs a very "wet" signal. Connect a cable from the output of the reverb to an input of your sound card. Press record and record the new "wet" track into your computer. Adjust the levels of the dry and wet tracks to your taste. There may be too much noise, but this really depends on the clarity of the output of the reverb and the quality of your D/A-A/D converters. Even if there is noise, it may be manageable if you use just a little bit of the wet signal in the overall mix of that track.

Give it a try
 
And be advised that your reverbs Predelay setting will be increased proportional to the recording "lag" that our soundcard has between what is outputted and what comes back in. Good drivers only produce about 1.5ms of delay, which won't much things up that much.

You really shouldn't have any noise issues that are any worse than you did when using those units with an analog console. Just make sure that you supply enough input volume to them.

Ed
 
If you're working with Sound Forge, you could try capturing the "sound image" with Acoustic Mirror, then apply it to your sound. Like pretty much evrything in Sound Forge, it's a destructive edit.

I haven't tried this yet. If you do, let us know how it goes!
 
That's a good point Sonusman. One way to work around this problem, if you think it really sucks, is to click and drag (nudge) that audio clip to the left a little bit.
 
Thanks guys, latency rears its ugly head everywhere - will nudge accordingly.

I'm especially intrigued by what I might get from Acoustic Mirror in SoundForge. Never appreciated it was there or what it could do! Have had a quick look and read the Help file so an evening's experimentation is in order.

Good call, Dafduc (may I call you daffy?), will report back on success or otherwise in a few days.

Thanks again all, Mark
 
Mark Jones said:
...I'm especially intrigued by what I might get from Acoustic Mirror in SoundForge. Never appreciated it was there or what it could do! Have had a quick look and read the Help file so an evening's experimentation is in order...
Click to expand...

Hi Mark

Acoustic Mirror is an excellent product.

Have you ever heard of Altiverb? Well Altiverb is a very highly regarded convolution based reverb plugin for Macintosh.

http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Altiverb/AltiverbMain.html

Acoustic Mirror is a DirectX version that works on the same principle. The quality of these plugins is only limited by the impulse files (acoustic samples) that are used with them.
The best software and hardware reverbs now use this principal.

Go here and download these two files....

http://clients.net2000.com.au/~rowmat/puk drum ambience.wav

http://clients.net2000.com.au/~rowmat/puk room ambience.wav

Get to know Acoustic Mirror and then load these impulses into Acoustic Mirror (not at the same time) and apply them to your drums. Don't worry about them being 'wav' and not 'sfi' files... they will still work.

These impulse files are Puk Studios live percussion room samples as provided in the TC Electronic M3000 reverb. Puk studios drum room is probably amongst the best in the world.

I'll give you about a week or so and the Alesis will be in the trashcan. ;)

Enjoy!
 
Since the character of a reverb is not only the setings but also the algorithms I think that something like Acoustic Mirror is the only way of getting a "Small 2" sound without the microverb.
 
thanks pundit,

Puk you say, that's the Scandinavian studio isn't it? Excellent, thank you for the tip. I remember an article about one of my favourite bands recording at Puk and they were in awe of the facilities. However, they did end up using a processed sound of one of them slapping their leg as their principal snare sound, go figure...! And the label passed on the album leaving them all very much in debt. Ah well, so it goes..

I'll certainly go get the files - good job my wife is out tonight, the mice can play! Will come back with what I've managed to sort out.

Thanks again everyone, the knowledge on this board is spectacular, cheers

Mark

P.S. regebro, I was thinking of mentioning algorithms in my original post but thought if I got that technical, I wouldn't have the slightest chance of decoding some of the replies! Cheers
 
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