Hi, I'm a new Pianoteq user and use it as a plug-in with Logic Pro X. I noticed that Pianoteq provides built-in reverb for its sounds. I understand that it's not advisable to put reverb on any instrument twice. My question is, does anyone have a recommendation on which reverb to use, i.e. the built-in Pianoteq reverb or one of the reverbs included with your DAW?
Any input is appreciated.
Hi civilizedchaos,
Pianoteq's stock reverbs are fairly nice to play with. If you feel like pushing the limits, I'd advise a good convolution reverb plugin such as Altiverb or EWQL Spaces. Beyond convolution reverbs, I particularly have a soft spot for FabFilter's Pro-Q plugin.
I mainly use PTQ as standalone and love the provided reverb very much because it sounds good overall and it is able to load impulse responses.
I'm no reverb professor so i love the simplicity of it.
When using PTQ as a VST i sometimes use fancier plugins just because.
You can actually use all the reverbs you want as long as it sounds good. There is no written rule for the piano sound. One thing to consider is the fact that Pianoteq unlike piano libraries does not have any kind of reverb baked in the sound itself while samples do have some unless they are recorded in an anechoic chamber. If you think about it people put a reverb on top of those libraries very often unless they have already been provided with multiple mics option. So you can also try even a very short reverb for giving "color" to your piano sound and eventually dial in a more wet reverb in a send channel. That's just one way of operating. You can also bypass the internal reverb and instead choose an external reverb altogether (be it convo or algo). It is a matter of personal taste in the end. Sometime I don't even use a reverb on my instruments and I prefer a short delay instead which gives the sense of space but it doesn't clog the mix. Anything goes as long as it sounds good.
Hi civilizedchaos,
Pianoteq's stock reverbs are fairly nice to play with. If you feel like pushing the limits, I'd advise a good convolution reverb plugin such as Altiverb or EWQL Spaces. Beyond convolution reverbs, I particularly have a soft spot for FabFilter's Pro-Q plugin.
Hello All,
Indeed, I supplement Pianoteq's presets (stock reverbs left alone) in Logic Pro by setting up a new bus and assigning it to Altiverb. My own particular secret sauce is to explore a given Altiverb reverb space; once happy with the sound, I then dial BACK the Altiverb's volume until I can no longer hear it, and then go back up in volume about 1 -1/2 db via the potentiometer that the bus furnishes.
Of course, one must be careful with this procedure: I have been guilty of adding way too much extra reverb in the past, because I was adding the third party reverb via headphones. When played over a standard sound system, the amount of reverb sounds terribly overdone. That's why I have revised my procedure to back off the bus's reverb until it is inaudible, and then only nudge its volume up only by about 1-1/2dB.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Joe
Thanks for the info everyone. Zaskar, you mentioned impulse responses . . . haven't heard this term before. Can you explain what these are and how you use them with the stock reverb?
Thanks for the info everyone. Zaskar, you mentioned impulse responses . . . haven't heard this term before. Can you explain what these are and how you use them with the stock reverb?
In this case impulse responses are recordings of the reverberation typically captured from real rooms, concert halls and so on; I'm sure you will be able to find guides online for instance with people bursting balloons in cathedrals to record the reverberation.
However they can also be made from hardware such as classic digital hardware reverb unit presets, or hardware reverb plates, or spring reverbs for example. Pianoteq has examples of these too.
Guitar cabinets are also captured as IRs for guitar hardware emulations, which is not directly relevant to Pianoteq.
CivilizedChaos,
LogicPro’s SpaceDesigner is reverb software that generates reverb by using impulse responses. What sets it apart from many other ‘convolution’ reverbs — a convolution reverb is a reverb that works with impulse responses — is that it not only has a vast collection of pre-recorded impulse responses (think of a space, any space, and there’s a good chance you’ll find an impulse response of it in SpaceDesigner’s collection), but it can also synthesize entirely new impulse responses according to your wishes. In a word, nearly endless possibilities.
And if you like to explore algorithmic reverbs, LogicPro has, again, an excellent plugin available to do so: the ChromaVerb, a high-quality reverb that has every parameter you need to produce a fitting reverb for just about any situation.
Because these are both ‘stock’ plugins, people tend to dismiss them as ‘probably inferior’ to dedicated third-party reverb software, but the truth is: these are every bit as good as all the popular favourites, and better than some of those in my opinion. I’m pretty sure that, if SpaceDesigner and ChromaReverb were sold as third party reverbs, they would garner as much praise as most of the other high-quality reverbs that are available.
The most important thing to keep in mind however, is that the quality of these tools increases with your knowlegde of them. In other words, the better you get to know them and the more confident you get at working with them, the better the results they’ll deliver.
Which is why I would strongly suggest to spend some time with these two plugins. Study them, experiment with them, … and you’ll soon discover that they’re both outstanding tools to place a Pianoteq instrument in any virtual space you can imagine, and always in a convincing and pleasing way. But, you have to learn how to do that.
Next to the reverbs, I would also highly recommend to study LogicPro’s included Delay plugins. Especially if you favour smaller spaces, a good delay — among LogicPro’s offerings, TapeDelay is my favourite — and the knowledge to work with it, is, in my view, indispensable if you want to to raise your technique of spatializing sound to a higher level.
The short of it is: LogicPro, your DAW, has all the tools you need. It really does. There might come a day when you feel you’ve exhausted most of the possibilities these tools have to offer, or when you simply would like to hear or work with something completely different, but long before that moment arrives, I hope you will have learned to agree that what’s available in LogicPro is totally satisfying, both sonically and musically.
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Here’s a pretty good introduction to SpaceDesigner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRGj4fXXLcA
And from the same source, this is a video about ChromaVerb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUTBKXDpiwk
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Thanks for the info everyone. Zaskar, you mentioned impulse responses . . . haven't heard this term before. Can you explain what these are and how you use them with the stock reverb?
Key Fumbler already explained what IRs are and what they do.
When you google "impulse response free" you get tons of free files that fit almost any need.
From amp cabinets, real rooms/hallls/venues to weird stuff like staircases, parking garages and even dumpsters or cola cans.
If you want to play the Blüthner in the milano scala just get the IR, start PTQ, go to the effects section and choose "Use WAV impulse" from the reverb menu.
Hi, it actually depends on your taste and what you want to play. There's no, like, essential advice or something, just follow your guts
Regarding your comments about the Logic Pro reverbs, Piet De Ridder, I've experimented a bit with them and like Chromaverb since it allows you to EQ the reverb. I have a few songs with lots of piano in the bass and when I applied reverb, it got muddy fast. Chromaverb is ideal to fix that issue.
On the downside I suspect Chromaverb takes up more CPU resources than the Pianoteq reverb. For the past week I've been reviewing articles on how to reduce the chances of getting System Overload messages in Logic Pro and someone mentioned Chromaverb is more resource intensive than Silververb for example.
Thanks for the video links, I will check them out.
Regarding reverb and the increase of mud, here’s an excerpt from post I wrote a little while ago on another forum. (Part of a conversation about ‘clean’ reverbs and EQ’ing reverb.)
(...) Nearly all of today’s reverbs, even the humble stock ones that come with our DAW's, are too good to add mud of their own to a mix. If you’re presented with a noticeable increase of ‘mud’ after adding reverb, it almost always means you’re sending mud into the reverb. If you then use a post-reverb EQ to remove that mud, you’re doing two things wrong, I believe: (1) you leave the mud-problem in the source signal unaddressed, and (2) you make the sound of the reverb thinner than it should be.
Far better, I find, to trace the source of the mud and solve the problem there. A reverb can actually be of tremendous help with this because it will reflect and ‘smear out’ the mud (or anything problematic in the source signal) in its tail, so if it’s difficult to determine which of your tracks (or which combination of tracks) is responsible for the mud — sometimes it's not obvious or easy to determine which tracks have too much mud by listening to an unfinished mix — simply send them, one after the other, through a reverb and you’ll quickly find out which of them is responsible for the reverb apparently generating mud. (The reverb doesn’t generate mud of course, it merely reflects the mud that is part of the signal it is processing.)
This reverb trick doesn’t just work with mud. You can also use to it to trace all sorts frequency problems in sources: whenever you find certain frequencies too present in a reverb’s tail, it usually means those frequencies need to be tamed in the source. Due to the diffused, ‘smoothened out’ nature of a reverb’s tail, any frequency imbalances are much more easy to spot in the tail than in the source signal. Any noticeable frequency bump in a reverb's tail is always cause for concern and should be looked at. A reverb never lies about these things.
I think I said this before, but in my experience, 80-90% of what may seem at first to be reverb problems are in fact not reverb problems at all.
So if, after adding ChromaVerb to your mix, you find that things start sounding boomy and muddy, I would first check the sounds that you’re sending into the ChromaVerb before doing any drastic EQ’in there.
Pianoteq’s sound isn’t always the easiest to mix, in my experience. Its instruments often contain quite a lot of low mid and low frequencies and if you send all that, uncorrected, into a reverb — even the best reverb — your mix will suffer. An additional problem is that when you attenuate all those troublesome frequencies at source (inside Pianoteq itself or with an EQ), it’s very likely you’ll end up with something thin and unpleasant sounding. And that’s no good either, obviously.
The way I try to solve the problem is (1) by cautiously EQ’ing Pianoteq, often even loading a second, a third and sometimes even a fourth instance (of the same instrument) in order to better be able to isolate specific problem ranges, and (2) EQ’ing the signal that is sent to the reverb before it enters the reverb. In other words: if you have ChromaVerb inserted in an Aux or a Bus, also insert an EQ before it so that you can make sure that you don’t burden ChromaVerb with too much low frequency content.
That way, you only have to do small EQ-tweaks inside ChromaVerb and thus the frequency ‘profile’ of the reverberation itself will remain more or less intact.
There’s loads of trial and error involved and it doesn’t always work like I would like it to work — a good balance of mids and lowmids in a mix is very difficult to strike, I find, and Pianoteq often doesn’t make it any easier — but the above outlined method is definitely the one that has given me the most satisfying results.
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Interesting info Piet.
By the way, is it possible to route another instrument to Pianoteq, just to use it as a reverb? (open a Pianoteq instance to be a send fx, so that other instrument has the same reverb as the piano).
For instance, I have tried to route a synth to pianoteq, but no effect is applied ; is there a trick?
By the way, is it possible to route another instrument to Pianoteq, just to use it as a reverb? (open a Pianoteq instance to be a send fx, so that other instrument has the same reverb as the piano).
For instance, I have tried to route a synth to pianoteq, but no effect is applied ; is there a trick?
No. That is not possible. There's nothing especially sophisticated about the convolution in Pianoteq, so I don't know why you would want that.
Also I don't think Modartt would ever want to do that as the microphone positioning is purely for instruments in Pianoteq, not for all your instruments within a DAW project.
OK, sad.
I wanted that because I could have had all my instruments "playing in the same room" with ability to change the room without having to charge a new IR in a new convolution reverb each time.
I don't know about anybody else, but I sometimes find Pianoteq quite tricky to integrate with an external reverb. Sometimes it goes better if I turn off Pianoteq's reverb, but in some cases that changes the character of the sound too much, so I keep the Pianoteq reverb intact (or just reduce it) before sending the sound out. There doesn't seem to be any reliable rule about this, it's just a case of 'experiment until you get a sound you like'. From reading Piet's post, that just seems to be the way it is with Pianoteq and reverb!
To be fair, it's the same with any VST I use. In my experience, there's almost no instrument I don't end up using various different reverb types, until I find the particular thing I'm aiming for.
I encourage anyone who is thinking about these things to dip a toe or two into a search for a DAW to become familiar with. Remember, it doesn't need to be all learned in a day. Take time - enjoying the process can be a good thing, not a burden, for any musician.
In a DAW, it can be something you get used to. May seem arcane - but following steps through, then standing back and giving it a think through.. you'll wonder why you didn't do it from years back.
I'd recommend this kind of ideal *using hopefully the kind of wording you see in most DAWs..
1
In a new project, insert Pianoteq onto a track. Disable it's internal reverb (Which I actually really like BTW for recordings - but also love other reverbs too).
2
Next, look for a "mix" view for that track.. some DAWs show it by default, other might need you to click a button to open the mix or 'console' view. You'll know it by seeing a "fader", like on studio 'desks/consoles'.
3
When the track's mix view is visible, look for "send".. click a selector like a plus sign, or down arrow to display "destinations" to send to (most open a little menu).. and you should be able to select something like "add FX channel". (for this, don't create or add a new bus channel or master etc. - FX is ideal).
So now, where the "mix" area is, you should see a new 'fader' like the first (maybe a different color).
What's now happening, is that Pianoteq on your "track" is sending a default signal into an FX "return" channel. Congrats!
So, maybe you guessed the next move - adding a reverb of choice in the FX channel.
4
Your DAW will have similar ways to do it. You may have an FX browser built in, from which to drag and drop any FX onto the "FX channel" strip. Or you migh just click a button or icon on the FX channel which says something like "Inserts".
5
OK so now, you may hear the reverb as being too loud. You can lower the FX channel fader!
That might be fine - but there's lots else you could do with this.
Initial things you may like to check, other than just balancing the two faders include:
a
Look within your reverb settings, for "Mix".. and/or "Dry" and "Wet".. you are likely to avoid common mixing issues, and to get your best results from making it a full "Wet" setting in the reverb. You may see a dial or slider to make "Mix 100%". That way, Pianoteq has its own signal path, the FX has no "dry" Pianoteq in it.. therefore, if you put extra FX on either channel, it may be more pristine overall.
b
See if your DAW comes with an built in "widener" tool or plugin. Many DAWs might have them. I often get good results using one JUST on the FX. I've probably yammered about that for years here. In short.. if the reverb channel sounds like it is "wider" than the piano sound, it gives more sense of depth to the listener - and may also help by then also NOT needing to be so loud and therefore not interrupting "energy" from the source piano.
c
In your reverb of choice, a common basic yet quite important thing you can alter to give further depth of field, is "Pre-Delay". That means, if you hit a piano key, you don't instantly hear reverb. So, try setting pre-delay to something like 20 to 69 Milliseconds - and lower or raise until. It sounds more realistic for the perceived space.
d
Some reverbs have 'ducking' built in. You may see a on/off for it - the reverb plugin may automatically 'ride' the incoming signal so you don't need to do anything but perhaps lower or raise a 'sensitivity' slider etc.
e
Consider inserting an EQ plugin (most DAWs have internal ones for no extra cost - no need to spend lots - but do so if you find tools you can enjoy and understand better). A good starting point for altering reverb EQ, is to try lowering some bass and/or some 'low-mid'. Some EQ tools may allow you to lower parts of the whole EQ range.. you can just lower little "notches" or push up little "peaks" - or make shapes until you hear what they sound like. I often try lowering a little bump around 500Hz.. also try lowering a little bump around 150Hz, and/or around 300-ish.. every piano, every reverb and every player and piece combo may mean different things might sound best, to you in any given project. Like most things, experiment - check videos to see things like "how to remove mud with EQ".. because MOSTLY we want the reverb to NOT compete in the bass/low-mid ranges.. you may or may not find improvements by pushing more bass, or more treble.. it often works best when the reverb has "less" detail than the main piano sound, which can then "seem" more up front without having to have it, or the reverb loud.
f
Let's say that you have lowered bass in your reverb, it all sounds better, except it is now too "thin" overall. You can surprise.. compensate in Pianoteq by raising slightly some aspect which your nice basic "mix" has altered. You might return some missing 'reverb bass'.. by adding a VERY short reverb in Pianoteq, with it mixed pretty low.. this may give a nice "player bubble" of extra reverb. Always tend to "subtle" unless you're going for a wild album sound.
g
Don't overlook that you may want to "Save" your project "My first piano reverb template" or another name you want to give it of course - that way - every time you want to play Pianoteq with that same saved reverb setup, you DO NOT need to manually do all this over and over. Computers huh!
Some DAWs may allow you to "Save As" some kind of reloadable "rack".. or "template".. or maybe if you think it better, in some DAWs you might be able to just right-click on each channel's "send" widget, and select "save preset". Seems advanced, but if your DAW allows this, it just means that no matter what other project you are working within, you can make a new track and load your saved channel presets with any FX you had set as above.
Some DAWs are more flexible than others - and all this can initially seem difficult - but it's not necessarily harder than learning open and save text documents.. and your DAW may have excellent video and other assistive documentation to show you how to do this in their way.
Those are pretty good basics to consider, no matter which reverb you try - and over time (trying various plugins) you may end up purchasing many different reverbs over time, unless it's not so important to you to be often tweaking this of course.
Like Piet mentions, there are all kinds of spatialization plugins also. Your own fav sound comes from you experimenting - and some DAWs may have 'user areas' where people share crazy amounts of tips, tricks, or just "settings" you can download and install (so that like templates, or those saved channel settings, may be reloadable with a click or 2).
Right now, I can think of many other things - but they will depend on your goals. Main goal - enjoy!
Wow, thanks Qexl, that's essential reading for anybody wanting to try an external reverb with Pianoteq.
Wo... Q! I came here lookin' for exactly that kind of you can try this or then that, "best practices" approach to reverb and mastering!
Haha, yes, let's hear it for Pianoteq's 'Q department'! Oh, do pay attention, 007...
Oh, many thanks Jeff and Dazric! You've made my day a better one. Just happy to help out
Definitely persist in using Pianoteq internal tools too tho.. they've delivered so many improvements over the years, most of my old wishes are answered through the course of their focus on real physics (which always inspires me) - and it continues to improve (Philippe, Julien, Niclas and the team have been, and continue, in excellence on all fronts).
Lots of people use a DAW for honing personal settings they figure that others may not be doing, for a point of difference, habits of old, or just for inspiration.. making a kind of very personal piano sound per project is mostly the reason I use a DAW or any old recording tricks - it's not always about fixing something per se - just added in case readers think I'm universally speaking about fixing issues or increasing realism in all the DAW talk
Let me know how you progress for sure - I'd enjoy helping more as things come up!
Cheers all!