What a cool sound! I love a good dragon hunt. Let's see what we can do with the magic black box to catch this dragon?
Bunch of ways to approach this. I played around with ducking, attaching an envelope controller to the Level parameter of the reverb block and finally I landed on what I think produces the nicest effect: having an ADSR controller assigned to the input gain parameter on a reverb block. This approach is super smoooooooth. And the ADSR gives you a ton of control over how the effect works just by varying your picking dynamics.
I ran the block in parallel, 100% wet, and really jacked up the level of the block so it's louder than the dry signal as the swell...uh...swells.
You can get a ton of control over the bloom this way. You can tweak the ADSR to decide how hard or soft you have to play to trigger the swell. You can change the swell length and shape of the swell with the ADSR too.
You can get the reverb to sustain with a held note if you play around with the ADSR in Sustain mode with re-triggering. Just tweak the threshold on the ADSR to keep it in the sustain region as long as you want to be there as you hold a note. I played around with the sustainer on my EOB Strat using this approach and it was pretty cool. I could get it to do feedback and then the reverb would stay swollen as the feedback came on. Really amazing.
In the controller block you can fine tune the rise time and the fall off time by playing around with the attack and release times. And the shape of the swell can be futher tuned with the start-mid-end controlls here.
And, of course, the advantage to doing this in the Axe-Fx III is you can pick
any reverb algorithm and apply this technique. You're not limited to just the one reverb sound. I thought it worked well with Deep Chamber, but Ambient was nice too. The lusher algorithms and longer times seem to work best. I bet the plate algorithms would be...swell...as well.
Here's a preset for you (uses the 17.01 RC beta):
https://axechange.fractalaudio.com/detail.php?preset=9191
The preset is just the
EJ Clean
factory preset modified to to have the parallel reverb block that does swelling.
And a quick clip of scene 2 in this preset. The first time through the pattern I'm just finger picking it. The second time through I kick on the sustainer circuit on the EOB strat (my battery is dying, sorry so it's a little unclean on the sustains). But you can hear how I can keep the reverb "swollen" as the sustainer circuit feeds back the guitar. I just roll my volume off at the end to drop the signal below the ADSR threshold and have it collapse into the release phase and the reverb dies off naturally. The pitch drop at the end is me pushing on the tremolo of the guitar. Sustainers are cool, too.
So fun.