Studio Room Simulations - do they exist?

[JimK]

I know that this must exist....

I am looking to take some type of reverb (convolution?) and add it to an VSTi instrument (piano, guitar, drums, etc.) and recreate the sound of recording these instruments live in a room.

The typical reverbs don't do the trick. I really would like to just recreate the acoustics of different studio rooms (or at least sound like they were in a room). I also see a technique of re-amping an instrument but unfortunately I do not have an adequate room to do this in since my studio is in my home.

Any/all ideas/suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Jim

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by JimK

The typical reverbs don't do the trick. I really would like to just recreate the acoustics of different studio rooms

I'm sure you can do this with regular reverbs and delays. I generally have three reverbs on buses, with one of them set to a "stage" type preset - short delays with fast decays. A touch of this does a good job of making a sterile track like a DI synth sound like it's in a room. I also set up two delays on buses, one panned hard left and one hard right, set to about 60 milliseconds each with the highs and lows rolled off. So if a track is panned hard left, I'll send it to the right buss to get a very soft and muffled echo on the right. This also gives a nice sense of space, without the wash of reverb you'd get from a normal plate type setting.

--Ethan

[Washington]

For convolution plugins, you may want to check the Lexicon 300 and 224 impulses from Welcome To Acousticas . They are not from "real spaces", but some give a really good sense of space. There's also the new Cooper Time Cube from UAD, the best imho at creating delay-based ambiances that you can dirty up to your heart's content. For the record, Logic's Space Designer collection of IR also has an impulse of a 0.08s "air balloon" that I found useful many times, at different points in the chain.

However, no plugin (or HW unit, for that matter), magically simulates a recording made in a real space just out of the box. As Ethan mentioned (and unless you actually CAN record in a real space with carefully placed mics ), creating "air" around your dry signal is almost always a matter of combining reverbs and delays, and fine tuning both pre- and post- EQ. Try to get a hold of every litterature you can find about Haas effect, about setting your predelays and reverbs in general, and more than anything about acoustics and how sound behaves in real space.

[JimK]

Washington,

You know how it goes, there isn't a MAGIC plugin that can put your instrument track in the middle of a room???? ee

Anyway, I have COOPER and it is simply marvelous. I used it on a vocal track and it was MAGIC.

Jim