Messed around with very small amounts of 'verb today, and...

I'm experiencing interesting results.

Scott Peterson has, for a long time, talked about direct recording and the close-mic IR simulation needing a touch of verb to give it a less "vacuumed" sense of space. I never really went that far into it, as I play predominately heavier music and the current thing is to have a pretty dry direct sound. But, after recent comments on another thread, I started thinking about how all my favorite heavy music recording engineers talk about room sound, and how I like sense of space in the real world, and so I started giving it the ol' college try. One of the biggest "problems" I've had with IRs is they can sound pretty sterile, so I'm always interested in ways to improve - and hell it's just a little change, so why not?

Now, this might be a whole bunch of horse pucky, but I'm pretty sure Scott is onto something here. I started with a regular room (large in this case) and brought the time down to like 2 seconds or so. Then I started adding in room until I started hearing reverb when playing quite loudly - I backed off until I could just hear a change in my sound without reverb - with the heavy stuff I'm sitting at like 0.5% or so - cleans a little bit more. Bass around the same 0.5% thing.

Well heck. Unless my ears are deceiving me... it's very subtle, but it's there. I've still got to work this up into a short mix, but based off of listening to double tracked guitars and some bass, I'm liking what I'm hearing. It sounds more like isolated guitar tracks from pieces I enjoy than just an IR, which can sometimes sound a bit flat and sterile to me.

So, my challenge to you high gain guys like me who are recording with IRs (like me) is give it a shot and see what happens. I'd like to hear what your thoughts are on the matter.
 
Yeah I used to play with the room parameters, but I'm not so sure about whether or not I like room. I like the reverb because I have a bit more control over certain things. I mean, we're talking tiny smidgeons of addition here though. So what were your room parameters like?
 
I find that adding room from a cab will be like baking in an enhancer into the sound.
It's most apparent with headphones.
 
Just a tiny bit of room reverb can sound great for heavy guitars. It really makes it easy to listen to a mix and picture a real band rocking out in a big room somewhere with their amps cranked, rather than just a bunch of isolated tracks close mic'd and put to tape.
 
Anybody else on this? I, for one, am just trying to get an idea of how much people seem to be using. Too much and it gets pretty ugly pretty quick on my end - I'm definitely finding a sweet spot between 0.5-1%, higher if I pull down the highs on the verb around or below 2,000 Hz.
 
Try bumping up Early Level by six or eight dB, dropping Reverb Level by the same amount, and setting Tail Delay to 130 ms or so. Then see how far you can turn it up before it gets ugly.
 
I have also started to experiment with the room parameters in the CAB block just a week ago with great success.
I have never been a fan of reverb/ambience on high gain (especially rhythm) sounds, but tweaking the ROOM parameters in the cab block definately enhanced the overal sound and the integrity of the guitar tracks in a full mix.
It somehow helps the close miced cabs to loose a bit of the scratchyness, but for the most significant change adding room helped these tracks to connect to each other and to enhance the sought after "3D amp-in-the room" feel. That said, I am still no fan of adding a seperate reverb block to high gain sounds, since the room parameter in the cab block does the trick for me.

On most of my high gain presets I am mixing two UR cabs together, with one cab (usually the more mellow one) having more room ambience mix (~50% room level) and the other one with less room level for mentaining note separation and attack definition (~5-15%). Make sure to always cross-check the suitable ambience level with headphones on, because it is a lot easier to do this on headphones than on reference monitors (IMO even on good ones it is more difficult to determine the right ambience level).

Cab 1 (mellow one): Room level: 30-50%, Room Size: 7
Cab 2 (more defined one): Room level: 10%, Room Size: 7

I hope that helps!
Cheers, Max
 
As usual, I think Scott knows of what he speaks. There is no subsitute for being in the trenches day in and day out. I always add just a touch of reverb. I find things sound "unnatural" without it. I think that's a significant ingredient in getting "amp in the room" tone through headphones.
 
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