In Summary
With many VIs being recorded in some of the world’s finest spaces, until now their rooms’ sounds could only be enjoyed on one instrument. Here we show you a way to put all your tracks in the same space in just a few moves.
Going Deeper
Recording everything in one room can lend an unbeatable sense of life to band recordings. That said, for the engineering composer, mixes are inevitably made up of a range of real and virtual instrumentation. Getting such a disparate gathering of sources to sit alongside each other can be a challenge; using a high quality convolution reverb or any tool that can evoke the sound of a real space can be just the tonic. Some might be surprised to know that using a conventional reverb isn’t the only way to give sounds a unifying ambience.
Modelling VI Ambience With Accentize Chameleon 2
Chameleon 2 is an intelligent ‘room modeller’ from the minds at Accentize. Simply put, it listens to an existing reverb or ambience, and then models it for use on other sources. Remarkably, it provides controls for things like decay, width, and pre delay in the style of any other reverb, meaning that ambiences can be tailored for a wide range of sounds.
Many VIs’ sounds are recorded in some pretty fantastic, purpose built spaces. Rather than recreating these spaces artificially, these instruments usually feature ambient perspectives that were captured with mics, as with any recording. These atmospheres can be perfect for unifying the whole mix using an advanced tool to use them across other mix elements.
In the video, we use Chameleon 2 to use our drum VI’s ambient signature for the whole mix. Using a single instance, we analyse the instrument’s ambient signature to create a profile. We then use this on a return shared by piano and guitars for a common sense of space that convinces.
With a lot of productions featuring a mix of real and virtual instruments, it’s possible to lose the visceral quality of recording everything at once in one space. While no-one’s pretending that there’s a plugin to recreate that, using Chameleon 2 to bottle and re-apply VIs’ expertly captured ambiences does work incredibly well. That could make it a great way to bring unifying room sounds for entire productions.
Accentize Chameleon 2 Key Features
Create unlimited different unique reverbs with a single click.
Automatic parameterisation of dry/wet-mixing, stereo-width and pre-delay.
Applications in creating realistic ADR and foley matching.
Applications in creative sound-design or music-production.
Extract the natural room-impulse-response of any recording and export as a wav-file.