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This is a preset for Valhalla Vintage Verb. Load preset.

Preset 3: Big Ambience

In the last preset, we looked at a short reverb which works nicely with drums. Now, I am taking Valhalla Vintage Verb to the other extreme with a preset which doesn’t sound good with drums, but is really great for slow ambient sounds.

Here is a Sound demo. This is a legato sound I made on my Roland JP-08 which is one of my reverb acid tests; many reverbs with long decays ring really badly on the tail with this sound.

This preset uses the newer “Smooth Random” algorithm for VVV.

About this preset

This is a preset which attempts to minimize the metallic coloration which old 1980s digital reverbs had at the expense of not sounding very good with percussive sounds. To wit:

• Both the early and late diffusion are at 0%
• The room size and attack are at their largest possible settings
• There is a lot of modulation in the tail to minimize ringing and metallic artifacts.

This is a quite bright reverb; the low bass has a shorter decay time and the high cut off is above 12khz (as a point of comparison, the original Lexicon 224 and Roland SRV2000 had a maximum bandwidth of 10khz); even with the upper-midband reduced by 9db the reverb can still be bright. Additionally, low frequencies are cut off fairly high (340hz) because low-frequency reverb can muddy a mix, so I prefer to cut it off. Indeed, Abbey Road studios cut off freqencies below 600hz and above 10khz with their reverb chambers and plates.

Load the preset

Here is the preset; on the left is the XML which Valhalla Vintage Verb loads; on the right are human-readable versions of the parameters. To load it in to VVV, copy the left side parameters, click on the preset name (to the right of “Presets”) in VVV, then choose “paste from clipboard.”

<ValhallaVintageVerb pluginVersion="1.5.0" presetName="Big Ambience" Mix="1" PreDelay="0.37200000882148743" Decay="0.72399997711181641" Size="1" Attack="1" BassMult="0.43200001120567322" BassXover="0.36399999260902405" HighShelf="0.6119999885559082" HighFreq="0.46399998664855957" EarlyDiffusion="0" LateDiffusion="0" ModRate="0.34000000357627869" ModDepth="0.84399998188018799" HighCut="0.77100002765655518" LowCut="0.22400000691413879" ColorMode="0.77777779102325439" ReverbMode="0.58333331346511841" />

100.0% 50.33 ms 23.78 s 100.0 % 100.0 % 0.78 x 400 Hz -9.31 db 5280 hz 0.0 % 0.0 % 3.47 Hz 84.4% 12710 Hz 340 Hz 1980s Smooth Random

Note that this preset requires Valhalla Vintage Verb 1.5.0 or higher; owners of previous versions of VVV can upgrade to 1.5.0 for free.

Next up

While this preset sounds really nice with slow legato sounds, it’s not a very natural sounding reverb. In the next preset, I adjust the settings to make the reverb sound more natural and work better with percussion.