Bloom-style reverb?

Jesse

Member
Searched but what I was finding was discussion of “bloom” relating to amps. Curious if anyone has figured out a way to do a bloom-style reverb? Good example in this video starting around 0:45 where he’s playing chords.



Basically the reverb level swells up after some time. Can’t figure out how to do it in the reverb block although I might be missing something obvious. Use a volume block in addition to the reverb?
 
Bloom was an original algo from the old Alesis midiverb 2 rack mount processor, preset #49 I think, if that might help the search
 
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.

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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.

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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.

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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. :D

So fun.

 

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If you find the reverb signal isn't overtaking the dry signal enough, but pushing the reverb level up higher causes output clipping, dial back the overall level of the preset or throw a studio compressor on the end of the chain running with a hard knee and some high compression to clamp it down.
 
On a casual listen it sounds like one of the "cloud" type Reverbs to me. I have something like that in my kitchen sink preset, but I don't remember which specific type it is.
 
Love that bloom, it’s next on my list of things to get going! I used to get gorgeous bloom/infinite sustain on my HRD, but it was hit and miss, it happened when it happened!
 
Seems that some predelay and diffusion on a pitch shifted reverb, in parallel, 100% mix, level a tad above dry would be a good jump off.
 
Love that bloom, it’s next on my list of things to get going! I used to get gorgeous bloom/infinite sustain on my HRD, but it was hit and miss, it happened when it happened!
With the ADSR approach on the Axe-Fx III you have a lot of control over how the trigger happens so you can definitely make it less hit and miss.
 
One of the popular methods for swelling (or blooming) reverbs is to feed the reverb with a multitapped delay with lots of taps. Reverb Pre-Swell is expressly designed for just this purpose. The many taps cause the envelope to grow over time due to the signal addition.
Tried it. Dig it. It's far easier to set it up this way.

I like the way you can quickly clear the reverb with the ADSR on the input gain approach. A light mute and it collapses the reverb back to nothing pretty quickly.

We're spoiled for options for crafting sounds here.
 
Another method for expanding the swell is to put either an expander block or optical compressor (and make it pump) after the reverb or and multi-tap.
 
@iaresee wow that clip is great.

If you post the block in the block thread, will the modifiers be with it as well?

Might make a 2nd version of my "hall ov doom" preset to have it swell in instead of always drenched.
 
Awesome! Thanks for the replies! Never even considered the delay block in front of the reverb. The ADSR idea made sense to me but couldn’t figure out what to apply it to?

Looking forward to checking this out. Thanks again!
 
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