IR for Apple Space Designer, AGAIN!

Da crew!

Ok, let's go outside the Molen Lab for a while, guys!

Due to the success gained yesterday with the Vermona experiment, today my Conservatory mates, the producer Fabrizio Barale and me decided to play with our school's rooms and environments in order to record other impulse responses and create other custom Space Designer presets.
Our classrooms have the great disadvantage of being huge, quite empty and located in an attic with concrete walls and floor tiles, then extremely reverberant. Terrible when you work and record, but great for the reverberations! The results were astonishing.

Gear: Apple iMac, KRK VXT8, RME Fireface800, a pair of Schoeps condenser microphones (Colette series with cardioid and omni capsules). We used a mono source (one VXT8) to play the sweep and the stereo pair of Schoeps to record it.

We ended with the 6 different presets I'll describe here below.

CAVE CLOSE. AB miking with microphones about 3 meters far from the source and 5 meters far from each other. 1 meter high from the ground.

CAVE FAR. Source and microphones at opposite ends of the room along its longest side, mikes quite higher from the ground than in the previous set (about 2 meters). Distance between mikes: unchanged.

CAVE FURTHER BOTTOM. As the previous one but with the mikes pointing to the ground and really close to it (low frequencies boost).

Metal Furniture.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE. We took an empty metal wardrobe, put it in front of the speaker (4 meters far from it) and put the mikes into it, one in the upper left and the other in the lower right.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE EXTREME. The same as the previous one but with glass doors closed. (Surprising result!)

THE ROOF IS ON FIRE - WIDE VERB. We recorded this one in the corridor with speaker in the middle and microphpones at opposite ends, about 15 meters far from the source. This time we used omni capsules. Great wide reverb this one, but unfortunately louder on the right side.

YOU WANNA STUFF? I GIVE YOU STUFF!

You can download all the presets from this link, for free:
www.sergiobertani.com/molen/conservatorio_cuneo_SDIR.zip

Hope you like it! Remember: if you use these reverbs in your productions, please don't forget to put our name in the credits list!

Tips to warm up the digital sound - PT1

Ok mates, this is for guys (like me, sadly) who play guitars and basses through software emulators or try to recreate the real sound of analog or acoustic instruments like drums, Fender Rhodes, Hammond, analog synths, etc. using virtual instruments.
Today I did a little experiment with a loop played by me and composed of drums (played and programmed on a sampler), bass and guitar (played through virtual emulator) and a wurli (played on a virtual instrument).

This is the mixdown with only software plugins/emulators:
Vintage Loop - DIGITAL

The experiment is to try to give a kind of "analog spice" to the digital sound. I decided to work on drums and guitar.

First of all, let's give a real room ambience to the drums. So I recorded my own room ambience with a stereo couple of microphones (Se4 by Se Electronics) put in ORTF mode, while playing the drums track through my VXT8 (bypassing the subwoofer). The pre-amp (Audient ASP008) is set with a hi-pass filter on 250hz to avoid bass frequencies resonances.

Afterwards I passed this track through my TL Audio A2 with maximum compression and tube stage set next to the peak limit.
This new track is to be kept at very low volume.

Later on I worked on guitars.
I put a microphone (an Se4 again) off-axis against the woofer of one of my two Equator D5. I chose this monitor because of the coaxial tweeter, to avoid phase problems.

As I did for the drums track, I passed the signal again in the A2 using the tube to get a real tube harmonic distortion.

The new mixdown is here below.
Vintage Loop - ANALOG

Obviously it's not a macroscopic difference, but this kind of processing can provide great results if used with taste and courage.

Good evening, mates.