Reverb Part II (a.k.a. trying to sound like your guitar hero)
 

I'm getting there, I think. I'm closer than where I was on the reverb. Thanks everyone for help in that area.

My guitar hero, Stephen Wake:






Me playing on my Larrivee:


I'll have to become more of a student of reverb in addition to eq'ing as a whole, but I think practicing is more important right now. I want to learn the rest of this arrangement and quite a few others, otherwise it's just putting lipstick on a pig, :D

Sounds nice to me, Barry!

Congrats, yours includes an airplane flying overhead. :)

Thanks Doug!

The air traffic around here seems to be attracted to microphones. :)

I'm so used to hearing them that I stop hearing them at times.....

If you’re looking for your reverb to be complimentary of your guitar use a frequency response meter (without the reverb applied) and take note of what appears to be the fundamental sound of your guitar in any given take. Then apply a plus 2 or 3 dB bump at that frequency (wide q) with an eq plug in on the reverb aux. On the other hand that would decidedly not apply if you’re looking to recreated what a particular room sounds like. If you’re instead looking to get your guitar to sound like it’s in an old cathedral the above ideas definitely don’t apply.

Also, reverb tends to not do well below 100. That’s not always the case but it’s always worth testing.

I find most really great reverbs tend to lean towards supplementing the instrument itself. I find audio engineer Frank Filipetti creates beautiful reverbs. For reference listen to James Taylor’s track “Gaia” on the album “Hourglass”. Branford Marsalis’ soprano sax part (after all these years) still gives me goosebumps. It’s of course the miraculous player but.....that reverb.

Barry, I tweaked your Me recording:

http://dcoombsguitar.com/Temp/Tweaked Me.wav

Thanks Rick, it has a fuller sounding reverb. What did you do?

Of course I started with your recording which you had already tweaked with reverb, etc. so I could not be too drastic.

Wake's recording is very much out of phase. That can sound just fine if you stay stereo. I added a bit of delay to one channel to decorrelate a bit.

I made the right and left volume levels closer to Wake's.

I boosted a bit three narrowish frequency bands in about the 250 to 800 range to more closely match Wake's.

I cut some in the higher frequencies to smooth out a little harshness.

Added a little more reverb.

Overall it's warmer than before but lacks some of the note definition in Wake's.

Thanks Rick! I'm going to look into this.

a lot of distortion here that I don't hear on Barry's original?

More reverb for sure and more than I prefer myself. Other than that nothing changed that would cause distortion.

Weird, sounds like a fuzz box on my end. I thought maybe it was my web player, but I downloaded it, and sounds the same played thru any of my DAWs. Right from the 1st note. Don't see overdriven waveforms, but it sounds like serious clipping. Maybe it's just the reverb on top of Barry's reverb (on top of the airplane :-)

Sounds fine to me in that regard. I prefer it because it's less harsh than prior. If started from scratch I might have put extra delay into the reverb to clear up the attack a bit - but who knows.

Very strange. Barry's track sounds nice and clean to me. Your mix sounds unusable. That's always the fear - not knowing how something sounds on someone else's system. It would have me digging for what's wrong with my playback, but everything else sounds fine. it'd be nice is there was some way to transport ourselves to someone else's listening environment!

Like I said prior, it sounds good to me. Now I am listening via headphones. If you are listening with speakers the extra reflections from the room you are in may in addition to the reverb in the recording turn things mushy.

Barry's recording sounds fine but compared to Wake's it is thinner and brighter. On the other hand Wake's is a bit honky sounding on some notes.
For my own stuff I am happy enough with a sound from such as http://dcoombsguitar.com/CDFive/WhereToDemo.mp3 to something a bit brighter and detailed
in other music types such as ragtime, blues, etc., for example http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Mu...huffleDemo.mp3

I never have ended up settling on something with heavy reverb.