Sonar's new convolution reverb

[dagosto]

I just got S5Pro installed last night. I played around with it and it was totally great. Keep in mind I haven't been able to mess too much with any of the higher end convolutions but I have used SIR the free convolution reverb. My limited experience with the heavyweights (Waves IR for example) is that the sound is good but they are a little hard to work with and hog CPU.

This one is called Perfect Space (from Roland) and it automatically shows up in your VST effect folder. Sonar automatically creates folders holding all the impulses (24-bit 88kHz by the way). When you load in an impulse you can use toggle arrows to switch between samples in the same folder. This gives you the ability to set up banks of your own in explorer. For me, this couldn't be any easier. I was even able to switch between impulses during playback with a very small amount of gapping (of course I have XP tweaked out).

The impulses are extemely useful and where obviously recorded extremely well. There are samples from live rooms, iso booths, caves, outdoors, bathrooms, springs plate, etc. There are even one like "bathroom with helecopter flyover" and othe special effects.

The cotrols are a little janky but the only ones I would use are the length and mix knobs which seem to work pretty flawlessly.

I was amazed at how easy it was to get a believable sound out of this thing. In my opinion everything sits better with natural reverb, and this is as close to it as I have heard. I brough up an old project and started taking the reverb off of everything and replacing it with perfect space. This was a 22 track project with a good amount of plugins and complex routing. The Perfect Space plugin seemed to add minimally to the CPU load. I loaded in six instantiations and the project ran fine. After this attempt to crash the project I actually started to try and mix with it. There was a special folder for kick and sare impulses so I went with that for the snare drum. I was very imressed with the life it added to the snare and was able to back of the compressor I had on the overheads and still get a beautiful sustain. The kick impulses were mostly special effects to create dub bass like sounds.

Next I put an impulse called "dark plate" over the entire vocal buss and a live room over the guitars both mixed very low. Definitely added a bit of life to everything right off the bat that I would spen much longer trying to achieve (usually failing) with a conventional reverb.

All in all, I was a little skeptical of how much better they could be but now I am hooked. And since it is pretty easy on the CPU I don't have to be frugal with it if I don't want to.

[Nubus]

I do love presets. Is that how it mostly works then? It's sort-of all presets?
I use Renaissance Reverb mostly and it pretty much destroys all hope for the cpu.

[dagosto]

Originally Posted by Nubus

I do love presets. Is that how it mostly works then? It's sort-of all presets?
I use Renaissance Reverb mostly and it pretty much destroys all hope for the cpu.

Well the presets are all wav files that the program uses as impulses. It comes with a lot but you can add you're own. Renaissance Reverb has some nice presets but those are just parameter settings. It is also sort of a cpu hog.

I got a chance to work al little more with it last night. I got a little deeper into the parameters. There is an eq that you can use to change the actual impulse. I find that it is kind of like using a dampening control with the added bonus of controling midrange. The reverse button instantly reverses the impuls without gapping. Haven't really found a great use for that yet but I probably will in the future.

So far I'm finding that the outdoor and studio liveroom impulses are working best for me. Those are the types of sounds that I could never properly emulate on a standard reverb. I am finding a few that are pretty convincing just not useable.

[Nubus]

MAN! I just realized how cool this is. You can capture in the plug-in the sound of any room you can find.

[dagosto]

I've also realized that you can sample any unit or plugin. Also it can do speaker emulation.