Reverb and ambience

[noisette]

***

[StephenGiles]

I put Adobe Audition 2022 on to one of my PCs  - a new function is "reverb removal" !! Used in moderation it works quite well!!!

[amptramp]

I doubt you can get an authentic cathedral reverb sound without being in a cathedral because you have a number of surfaces at different locations that cannot be replicated by a single delay time.  For a good example of this, Malinda Reese has a very nice video of her singing "How Can I Keep from Singing" in the Washington National Cathedral in the chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea:

You would need multiple delays to achieve this sound.

[noisette]

For a good example of this,...

Wow!

[mdcmdcmdc]

There's maybe an element of the uncanny valley at play here?

I remember seeing some old ads for fuzz pedals that were touting their ability to turn your guitar into a trumpet; clearly that application was a very useful failure.
Similarly, oil can reverbs, tape echos, spring reverbs, any kind of ambience generating device that doesn't sound like a "natural space" we can process as a thing-unto-itself. But if it comes too close to a representation of actual reality it seems less interesting or maybe "musical" (ie, "digital reverb is boring" or something).

Maybe everyone got really excited at shimmerverbs for a second because they took a thing that existed in some kind of aural uncanny valley (digital reverb) and pushed it out of the valley.

[Elektrojänis]

Indeed,  not really a natural space but valid under the laws of physics!

If we take nthe natural in the natural space that literally, tehn most of the spaces that have been tried to replicate are not natural at all.

BTW, how the hell did you find that ?!?!?!

I had seen/heard it before and what you said about doubling yourself on a delay just brought it back to my mind. The search on instagram is not very good but afeter a few searches I got lucky.

This one is really cool,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3uu7eWwvg

And I did not know there was more, although I should have suspected it. The setup is just too good for only one jam. There is less distinct echoes (or should we call tehm delays?), but still very cool and it's very cool how he controls the amount and quality of the ambiance by playing more or less into the pipe.

However, I feel like I may have steered the conversation away from Mark's original intention. To get back to that, one thing that can get the ambiance beyond most natural spaces is the real time control. Maybe a expression pedal to control the amount of the shimmer. It could also be control over somethin more subtle, like a balance between early reflections and longer more diffuse reverb tail. That way one could make some parts sound big and other parts more intimate.

[amptramp]

For a good example of this,...

Wow!

Malinda has released another video that shows even more reverb and superb vocal control: