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Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:54 pm
by Michael Willis
I've been working on a new reverb plugin. It uses Freeverb3's ProG algorithm, and the user interface is based on the Dragonfly Hall Reverb (it looks almost exactly the same, but with different dials).

An alpha release is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4qp6jl4gofg10 ... a.tgz?dl=0

Please don't use this for any real work. It is still missing presets, the help text is copied directly from Dragonfly Hall Reverb, and it likely has bugs that will ruin your whole day unless you are quick to hit the mute button.

Any testing would be very helpful! Once I am ready to make an official release, it will be packaged with the Dragonfly Hall Reverb download.

If anybody is interested in helping or following along with the development, here is the branch on github: https://github.com/michaelwillis/dragon ... /tree/ProG

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:54 pm
by JamesPeters
I'm in. :)

It seems to be working fine for me so far (Linux VST in Reaper).

I see the controls are fairly limited at the moment. To get my favorite settings in ProG, I had to adjust more controls, although I had been using it more as a "very smooth hall reverb". So far I'm able to get a nice room sound with this plugin.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:56 pm
by Michael Willis
JamesPeters wrote:I'm in. :)

It seems to be working fine for me so far (Linux VST in Reaper).

I see the controls are fairly limited at the moment. To get my favorite settings in ProG, I had to adjust more controls, although I had been using it more as a "very smooth hall reverb". So far I'm able to get a nice room sound with this plugin.
Nice! Let me know which controls you used. I looked at ProG's presets and only included ones that had different values for the room presets.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:04 pm
by JamesPeters
That might be tricky since I can't load the ProG plugin in Linux. My laptop still has Windows 7 so I'll see if I can get a setting for ProG using that. I'll also load Hibiki because I'm sure you want me to make suggestions for controls to add to that too. :)

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:19 pm
by Michael Willis
JamesPeters wrote:I'll also load Hibiki because I'm sure you want me to make suggestions for controls to add to that too. :)
Heh... I know, you really want the Spin Factor. Sorry I never wrote back on that, life has been kind of crazy this year, and I was hoping that ProG might do what you want so that I could avoid making more changes to the way that Dragonfly Hall Reverb integrates with the Hibiki algorithm.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:31 pm
by Michael Willis
Oh, I should mention that I renamed some of the settings, trying to better reflect what they do.

Code: Select all

ProG name -> Dragonfly name
---------------------------
FAC       -> Oversample
RT60      -> Decay
BASL      -> Boost Freq
BASF      -> Boost
DAMP      -> Dampen Freq
Hopefully the others are clear enough. I didn't expose ILPF, OLPF, and OLBW because they were all set the same for the presets that I was interested in. Somebody could probably talk me into including one of them.

Edit: This page documents ProG's settings: http://freeverb3vst.osdn.jp/tutorial/tu ... prog.shtml

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:39 pm
by AlexTheBassist
Sounds interesting. I'm ready to participate.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2019 1:53 pm
by finotti
I did a quick test this morning. I used it in Carla with some amp simulations and other effects when practicing guitar.

I used it 100% wet (in parallel with the guitar signal), did some tweaking and did not have any problems with it. And I *really* liked it on the guitar! It gave some great ambience without masking (mudding) the guitar signal, even when using a lot of reverb.

I haven't had the time to do some real production these days, but I look forward trying it on (DrumGizmo) drums. I'd guess it should work really well with them too.

The only thing that I noticed was that the output might be a bit low (at least when 100% wet). I had to crank it up... But, to be honest, I forgot to do side by side comparisons with other reverbs, so maybe it was just my first impression.

One request: would you consider a different color scheme to help visually differentiate the Hall and Room versions? (Very minor "issue", of course...)

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2019 2:14 pm
by Michael Willis
finotti wrote:One request: would you consider a different color scheme to help visually differentiate the Hall and Room versions? (Very minor "issue", of course...)
Yes, I definitely think a different color scheme is in order, this was just a quick prototype mostly reusing code and graphics from my other plugin.

I'm glad you like the sound of it! Over the last several months I have had a number of people suggest that I build a plugin with this algorithm, and somewhere I got the idea that it would work really well for guitar band stuff, so it's nice to have a guitarist validate that.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2019 7:48 pm
by GMaq
Hi Michael,

Thanks for your work on these great plugins!

I haven't taken the opportunity or had time to try this new variant yet but it sounds promising, if you are interested in this Reverb being more suited to guitar-based bands and productions one type of digital Reverb that is conspicuously absent for guitarists is the emulation of a hardware 'spring reverb'. Many classic and vintage guitar amplifiers have a spring reverb built in and it has a character and sound that is very specific (in the same way that 'plate' reverbs all have a common characteristic sound). I'm curious if any of the algorithms you use to create presets emulate spring Reverbs, that would be a really cool niche sound to have digitized for guitarists.

https://www.amplifiedparts.com/tech-cor ... d-compared

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2019 10:37 pm
by Michael Willis
GMaq wrote:I'm curious if any of the algorithms you use to create presets emulate spring Reverbs, that would be a really cool niche sound to have digitized for guitarists.
A spring reverb would be great. So far my plugins are just wrappers for algorithms that I find in the freeverb3 collection. I took a look through the other algorithms and found a couple of plate reverbs, but no spring reverbs. One of these days I might try doing the research to develop a spring reverb emulator.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2019 12:33 am
by AlexTheBassist
Michael Willis wrote:A spring reverb would be great.
Yes, please! Room reverbs are cool on stringed instruments, but electric guitar is where a good spring reverb shines.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2019 3:26 am
by Michael Willis
Well, after a cursory search I found these two discussions about emulating spring reverb:

https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index ... 146/page-2

http://www.spinsemi.com/forum/viewtopic ... 5a8add3cc8

It seems like it would be hard to get it to sound good at all. Even the developer of Valhalla isn't happy enough with his spring reverb to release it. Still, it could be fun to try, and freeverb3 does have some of the necessary components, like the allpass filter.

I won't make any promises, and I really should finish up dragonfly room before even trying dragonfly spring.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 4:17 am
by Michael Willis
New beta release v1.9.0 available here. This packages both the new Dragonfly Room Reverb, and the renamed Dragonfly Hall Reverb. The latter should be able to replace the old Dragonfly Reverb, as it is essentially the same plugin and identifies itself as such; please delete the old Dragonfly Reverb LV2 and/or VST before using the new one, existing projects should automatically use it without any ill effects.

There are still several things that aren't done yet. Dragonfly Room Reverb still needs a change in looks to more easily distinguish it.

I made a first attempt at some presets for Dragonfly Room. I'm still not sure how much I like them, please experiment with them and let me know which (if any) are useful and sound as described.

Re: Dragonfly Room Reverb - Testers needed

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 11:27 am
by alex stone
Michael, is it possible to add Non Session Management support to the standalone version of Dragonfly?

http://non.tuxfamily.org/wiki/Non%20Session%20Manager

Alex.