playz123 wrote: ↑Oct 08, 2024 7:28 pm
Piet wrote: "short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds". LOL, I'm guessing that is not what you really meant to say??
Milli- of course.
Milliseconds. Dear me.
Luciano Storti wrote: ↑Oct 08, 2024 8:44 pm (...) Do you ever add any modulation to the Delay itself? I was using Logic's Tape Delay and liked it for this, including the HiFreq roll-off. What do you use? And would you care to elaborate on your approach for Brass?
I’ve got a few delays to choose from and there’s not much between them for this particular purpose. I don’t really have a preference. Well, maybe EchoBoy (because I’m so comfortable with it). But there’s others that work equally well. For that spatial feel though, I prefer a plugin that’s capable of generating stereo delays, so mono mock-vintage delays (like UA’s wonderful EP-34 or Pulsar Audio’s Echorec and such), which get used very often for other things, aren’t chosen for this task.
No, I don’t use any modulation. I don’t like that whirly, slightly nauseous sound. Not in this context anyway. It’s very important, I find, to aim for a barely noticeable and above all natural-sounding presence of space. A listener should never say: “Hey, there’s a short delay on that, isn’t there?” Not good. You don’t want people to hear it, but you’d hear it when you take it out.
There’s two different ways I use delay on brass. The first one is to emulate something I occasionally hear on records too: brass instruments being so brassy, they sometimes trigger much more pronounced early reflections than the other sections of the orchestra do. Well, it’s more than just early reflections, it’s a sort of additional concentration of delays, clearly separated from the source and not yet dissolved in the tail. Percussion triggers these things as well, but adding delay(s) to percussion in a mock-up, even when hardly audible, is always a bit risky, as in: potentially messy, I find. With brass however it often works, to my ears. The idea here is to generate a single, fairly short, blurry cluster of delays and preceding that with whatever amount of predelay fits you spatial illusion.
A great (quite possibly: the best) tool for this is Flux’s IrcamVerb. In fact, that’s where I got the term ‘cluster’ from for this phenomenon. IrcamVerb splits its reverb in three stages: (1) the Early Reflections, (2) the Cluster and (3) the Tail. And the great thing is: you can mute any of these stages and simply work with the one that you need, in our case; the Cluster.
The second way is adding a delay — this time more of a classic ‘echo’ — to brass solos, especially slower ones. It’s not a realistic effect or anything we’re going for here, but it just adds someting which, to my ears, has musical and esthetic value. It is what I always call my “The Hills Are Alive”-trick. As with the other techniques, this one needs to be added extremely subtly too. One of those “the moment you hear it, dial it back a few notches”-things, you know. And when mixed in just right, it somehow increases the soaring or majestic or noble qualities in brass phrases. Not essential, just nice.
I’d love to make some audio examples of all of this, but I’m working on this rather heavy and complex thing in Logic at the moment (with various channels routed to Vienna Ensemble and SPAT Revolution), and I hate to close it before I’m done with it.
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