Achieving a brilliant lead trumpet sound
Wondering if anyone has any tips on getting a really shimmery lead trumpet sound, one that really covers the brass section.
Thank you, best regards
Thank you, best regards
Comments
IMHO, what you're looking for isn't a shimmery lead trumpet sound, but a "brass section behind" sound ^^.
As you can hear, all the sample modeling sound are pretty dry. The "anechoic feeling", while really interesting for precise mixing, can also be a pain when you don't know how to deal with it (and it's not easy at first, far from it).
The main element to achieve this is to have a good understanding of what an ER (early reflection) is.
The brain uses something like the first 300 ms (give or take, actually it's less than that but it doesn't really matter) of a sound to determine its location in space. The rest of the reverb is called the "tail" and is more about giving a feel of the room than placing the sound in it.
If you have a convolution reverb plugin, look at the shapes of the reverbs. If they're not cut to be only tails, you will see that the beginning has a specific form, kinda detached from the rest. That's the ERs.
Early reflexions have two main parameters : predelay and volume.
Predelay determines the distance between the instrument and the listener. A long predelay means you're closer to the source, a short one, that you're far away. (When you're close, the direct (dry) sound goes directly to you. The early reflections, which are bouncing on the walls and the floor, come after a small but significant amount of time. When you're far away, the dry sound has to travel as well, and the ERs (especially the ones bouncing on the floor, i guess) are almost traveling the same distance)).
Volume, of course, has to be set up accordingly, but it's also a matter of taste (how "wet" do you want your instruments to be). The only not logical thing would be to have a wet close soloist and dry far band.
So, in your case, you should try to:
set up an ensemble sound, with some ER with a nice predelay (don't know, between 15 and 50ms, I have no way to listen to anything right now, so...).
Put a dryer trumpet on the front, with a stronger volume (but not that much, since all the reverb on the band will naturally put the trumpet on the front).
If your reverb does no damping, EQ the band a little bit and remove some trebles (trebles tend to be absorbed by air).
Then, If you're still not satisfied, you can do some mix tweaking, like EQing down the band a little bit around 1.5Khz.
Et voilà ! ^^
I in fact also believe that the "shimmering" is not an issue of the instruments but of the room.
I do know that "Vienna" provides a multi-channel convolution algorithm, that allows for placing instruments in a virtual room.
Maybe something like this is available somewhere without an instrument library and for a less steep price.
In fact I do use the convolution plugin that is provided out of the box in Reaper, but it seems to allow only for "stereo" impulse files. I suppose that means the two input channels are mixed together and two output channels are generated from that single signal.
There are lots of such impulse files freely available in the Internet, but even decently handling two instruments is close to impossible that way. Here you would need multiple appropriately related impulse files for the same room.
Maybe a simple version of such a multi-channel impulse response might be using the same impulse file separately for each instrument and adding a delay to both output channels of all of them, individually tweaking the delay. This would create a simplistic simulation of instrument positions.
For my pipe organ experiments, right now, I simply use two randomly selected impulse files for the same church room for two sets of pipes (no swam instruments, but generated by a DX7 plugin). Not perfect but rather nice and in fact "shimmering"
-Michael
I discovered it in this forum a while ago and so far, it worked for me. The latest version even has preset for SM instruments!
In case you missed it before...
Cheers,
But it's true that this virtual soundstage v2.0 looks really interesting. I wouldn't have spent already all the money I spent on my vienna MIR Pro, i would definitely check it out ^^.