With LiquidSonics room mimicry well-known in the post production world, Cinematic Rooms’ famous spaces are lesser known to some music mixers. We take a listen to its Standard edition on voices and instruments.

Few would deny that artificial reverb has come a very long way since the days springs, plates, and chambers, with the digital reverberators that emerged in 1970s holding court for two decades or so until the DAW revolution took hold. The arrival of viable audio plugin reverb has now given way to tools that go so much further than their hardware digital forebears. With software tools that cover all needs from electromechanical reflections, through hardware-style algorithmic ambience, right up to jaw-dropping convolution-based realism, for many audio plugin reverb has all but taken over.

Reverb As Reverb

Music mixers will be familiar with favourites such as plates and chambers. Having been developed to sound like real spaces, their unique aesthetics have become sounds in their own right. In turn, engineers will employ these sounds where it is customary to have reverbs to make proceedings sound like a record using sounds that are inherently artificial.

Reverbs For Realism

Post production mixers lean on reverb for much more than creative sweetening, and for placing sources in spaces that marry up with what the viewer is seeing, mixers prize believability above all else. Other uses when mixing for picture may also involve matching studio recorded ADR with location ambience.

In music production, being larger-than-life often takes precedence over being true to it. With that in mind, when a ‘real’ aesthetic is needed, those in music production (other than in classical or jazz) are often inclined to record close, and re-introduce ambience later. With the right reverb, this frequently sounds better than moving the mics back in a poor sounding space.

Using Cinematic Rooms Standard Edition For Music

Cinematic Rooms Standard edition presents something of a double-sided coin for music mixers who need to generate spaces so real that some only betray their presence once the reverb has been muted! In the video we audition some sounds on voices and instruments that will be familiar to some, and entirely new to others. We hear for ourselves how its streamlined controls give way the the real star of the show; its sound.

Rooms In The Mix

Reverb is somewhat unique in as much as it is generating new audio assets from the input; the same cannot be said of other familiar studio tools. Pulling off the seemingly impossible, the best of these can evoke realism that post production mixers using tools such as Cinematic Rooms Professional have come to rely on.

For music mixers, Cinematic Rooms Standard edition presents a solution that isn’t trying to sound like studio reverb in the classic sense. It is instead a very serious contender for those times when working closer at the tracking stage is preferred, and believable ambience in the mix is needed. Of course it has its own take on ‘production’ flavoured classic halls, chambers and ambiences as well. Added to its streamlined control set that delivers a large chunk of what Professional edition users already enjoy, music mixers have plenty of reasons to check it out its absolute realism for themselves.