Finishing Line / Reverb

The Land Lovers record wings its way down to WAV Mastering tonight - just a few little bits of tidying up here and there left.
Assuming I can restrain myself from tweak-mania on some frequency in the snare thats annoying me or some similar wild goose chase. Why is it always the snare?

As mentioned last week the Acousticas Bricasti impulse responses...
Are.
A.
Maaay.
Zing.

They really brought life into the mixes over the last week or so - even adding too much reverb sounds good with them.

I was looking around for a convolution reverb for PT M-Powered on Mac last week to give the IRs a try and was surprised how few options there are.
Altiverb don't do demos.
Waves IR-1 is $800 or something stupid.
SIR / Voxengo don't do RTAS.

The two options left were TL Space and MCDSP Revolver.
I'd heard great things about TL Space from Steve Shannon, but I had already demo'ed it about 2 years ago, which ruled that out, so Revolver it was.



Initially I was dissappointed to see Revolver reporting a latency of 1024 samples.
This immediately kills a reverb plugin for me - if I wanted a pre-delay, I'd add it myself :)
Luckily, a bit of digging around turned up a low-latency mode with zero reported latency.
Nice.

So, the Bricasti IRs.
Wow-eee.
Wonderful stuff. Like I said, you can use way too much reverb and it still sounds good.
No, make that great.
The right IR immediately becomes part of the sound - like its always been there.
Most of the time I'd start off by finding one that suited the vocal, then trying to feed various other things in to it to see how well they sat - snare, guitars etc.
Sometimes I set up a seperate verb where I needed a different sound, but for the most part feeding everything into one 'main' reverb worked a treat.

Revolver is cool, with a huge number of tweaky parameters (luckily split across several different pages to keep the interface uncluttered), EQ and two seperate built-in delays.
DSP use is fine, and the included presets are pretty decent.
Combined with the Bricasti responses, it's definitely the most fun I've had with a software reverb.
I'll report with more thoughts on Revolver as I get to know it better.

Anyone got a real Bricast I can 'borrow'? :D

It Lives!

I'm back on the Blog Wagon, so to speak.

Just finished up a single/7" for Hired Hands with mastering by Richard down in Wav Mastering.
Had a lot of fun recording them in their rehearsal space (a large church hall), a lovely room with nice ambience. In fact, the room was like an extra member of the band - in a good way, luckily.

I even managed to take a pic during the live tracking part of the session, although most of the juicy stuff is obscured - nice big pic here.. PIC.

Drums are hidden between two down n' dirty gobos (tables covered in blankets) with the guitar amps either side (one, a Vox, is visible to the right).
Bass amp is behind the Mac, facing away from the drums.
Drums were SM7 on kick, U87 snare, Royers overhead all into API.
An ATI 8mx2 took care of the other mics - 441s on guitar, SM57 and some MXL mic on bass.
Clarinet, Sax and fiddle overdubs were Royers with a little bit of U87 here and there.
Vocals were mostly SM7.

The next week or so will be mixing the new Land Lovers record at home, with finishing touches back in Nutshed Studios where the album was tracked in a fun but intense 5 days in March.
12 hour days with recuperation via rum leaves little time for sleep :)