10-19-2018, 02:58 AM
I recently had a little adventure that I found pretty exciting and figured some might benefit from it as well.
We all use a variety of sample libraries together in our templates and so we all face the issue of "baked-in reverb." Libraries often feature wildly different amounts of recorded reverb on the samples. Our many conversations on reverb can attest to the many approaches and challenges in that area and how, particularly, it effects our own use of applied reverb.
Two of my main libraries are Project SAM "classics" (Orchestral Brass Classic and True Strike 1). Both are for the most part very wet. Perhaps because of the era in which they were released; I'm not entirely sure. Throughout the course of the few projects I've completed I've tried a variety of things, but I've noticed a steady trend toward drying up the samples as I move forward and learn more about reverb and space in a mix. It seems they sound great "out of the box" but as one's ear for VO develops one begins to notice certain things, call them "conflicts."
In the case of Orchestral Brass Classic I had recently begun to err on the side of shutting off the release trails (or sometimes, "reverb tails") on the sustain articulations and to browse the library, experimenting with the other patches for similar programming. I noticed that the release tails were really only present on the sustain samples and no where else (and not even all of the sustains). They were, in effect, a kind of "extra feature" that actually disrupted the continuity of the library over-all.
My "adventure" was in recently discovering that there was a bug I'd somehow only just caught in which many of the staccato and stac-variants did not dry up at all because the knob assigned for that did not work (needless to say I had this fixed by ProSAM post-haste). I had often had an issue with the roominess of some of the staccato articulations in OBC and suspected they were contributing to mud in the reverb of my tracks. It was rather exciting to discover I wasn't wrong! It's since led me to a revelation that there is a whole world of "baked-in" reverb on such samples as these, as well as one-shots and percussive samples that I really should be tweaking in order to better fit these samples to my own projects. I've advanced in my understanding of the relationship and differences between "stage ambience" and release / reverb tails. (This may be common sense to some here, but in my defense VO is complex and not all discoveries are immediately apparent). I've worked with samples before where it was obvious a little cutting back on the release was necessary, but in other cases it was almost as if my ears were perceiving the releases as part of the natural tone of the instrument. So there is another wrinkle on the brain for me.
Now, I'm not saying that releases are in any way a "bad" thing. I think it simply varies from library to library and are an important thing to consider in one's own mix, especially as pertains to the application of reverb.
We all use a variety of sample libraries together in our templates and so we all face the issue of "baked-in reverb." Libraries often feature wildly different amounts of recorded reverb on the samples. Our many conversations on reverb can attest to the many approaches and challenges in that area and how, particularly, it effects our own use of applied reverb.
Two of my main libraries are Project SAM "classics" (Orchestral Brass Classic and True Strike 1). Both are for the most part very wet. Perhaps because of the era in which they were released; I'm not entirely sure. Throughout the course of the few projects I've completed I've tried a variety of things, but I've noticed a steady trend toward drying up the samples as I move forward and learn more about reverb and space in a mix. It seems they sound great "out of the box" but as one's ear for VO develops one begins to notice certain things, call them "conflicts."
In the case of Orchestral Brass Classic I had recently begun to err on the side of shutting off the release trails (or sometimes, "reverb tails") on the sustain articulations and to browse the library, experimenting with the other patches for similar programming. I noticed that the release tails were really only present on the sustain samples and no where else (and not even all of the sustains). They were, in effect, a kind of "extra feature" that actually disrupted the continuity of the library over-all.
My "adventure" was in recently discovering that there was a bug I'd somehow only just caught in which many of the staccato and stac-variants did not dry up at all because the knob assigned for that did not work (needless to say I had this fixed by ProSAM post-haste). I had often had an issue with the roominess of some of the staccato articulations in OBC and suspected they were contributing to mud in the reverb of my tracks. It was rather exciting to discover I wasn't wrong! It's since led me to a revelation that there is a whole world of "baked-in" reverb on such samples as these, as well as one-shots and percussive samples that I really should be tweaking in order to better fit these samples to my own projects. I've advanced in my understanding of the relationship and differences between "stage ambience" and release / reverb tails. (This may be common sense to some here, but in my defense VO is complex and not all discoveries are immediately apparent). I've worked with samples before where it was obvious a little cutting back on the release was necessary, but in other cases it was almost as if my ears were perceiving the releases as part of the natural tone of the instrument. So there is another wrinkle on the brain for me.
Now, I'm not saying that releases are in any way a "bad" thing. I think it simply varies from library to library and are an important thing to consider in one's own mix, especially as pertains to the application of reverb.
