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Written by Sean Costello

Upcoming Plugin: ValhallaRoom

Written by Sean Costello
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Things have been pretty quiet for the past few months here at The Halls of Valhalla. I’ve been hard at work on my new plugin: ValhallaRoom.

I’ll be talking about this new plugin in length over the next few weeks. A quick summary of what it does:

  • ValhallaRoom features several original reverberation algorithms, designed to produce tight and subtle room sounds, as well as larger hall sounds and huge ambiances
  • Unique Early reverb section allows user to dial in subtle and short bursts of early reverberation energy, as well as gated reverbs up to 1 second in length.
  • The Late section produces natural reverb decays ranging from 0.1 seconds to 100 seconds. The decay can be controlled in 3 adjustable frequency bands.
  • Both Early and Late reverb sections have adjustable modulation, to produce sounds ranging from lush chorusing, to subtle and natural long decays.
  • ValhallaRoom is true stereo. The Early and Late reverb sections are both stereo-in, stereo-out.

The goal of ValhallaRoom is to be a useful “workhorse” reverb, for subtle drum rooms that can be felt more than heard, lush halls, dense plates, and big ambient decays. The algorithm designs have been influenced by some of the “classic” room simulation boxes, as well as state of the art modern theory.

ValhallaRoom will be released in the next few weeks. Price will be $50 US. I’ll post progress reports to the blog.

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Comments (19)

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  • Mateo

    Nice! Will it be possible to do inverse reverbs with it? I’m desperately looking for one that doesn’t cost and arm and a leg..

    Reply
    • seancostello

      Hi Mateo,

      No inverse reverbs currently in there. Gated, yes, but no inverse.

    • seancostello

      Y’know, let me think about this for a bit. I’ll get back to you about this…

    • Mateo

      I like the sound of that! thanks

  • Chuck Zwicky

    You always have a unique take on signal processing, I can’t wait to hear what you’ve dreamed up in this new verb!!

    Reply
  • Evan Margol

    Awe-some!!!

    Reply
  • Artemiy Pavlov

    Brilliant UI design! A computer user interface that is not afraid to look like a computer interface. Very glad to see you NOT make it look like fake hardware.
    BTW will there be any offer to ValhallaShimmer owners?

    Reply
  • cebec

    I am really looking forward to this. I love Shimmer and I love your GUI aesthetic.

    Reply
  • Cold oscillation

    I have a question about Valhallaroom on Mac.
    Is it possible to work with Valhallaroom and the OSX screenreader Voiceover?
    Here some Informations about Voiceover for Developer:
    http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Accessibility/Conceptual/AccessibilityMacOSX/OSXAXIntro/OSXAXintro.html
    Regarts

    Reply
    • seancostello

      I’ll look into this. I know that I asked the Juce developer about this in the past, and there wasn’t any follow up on his part, so I’ll ping him again. Juce is the SDK that I use for developing my plugins, so Voiceover would probably have to map to something in Juce.

  • Klemperer

    For the not sooo rich users of your plugins – after you finished your surely great work, could you tell a little bit about the differences to EOS (which I use as a kind of “workhorse”, and Valhalla shimmer for special sounds)? I really love both of your reverbs, the audiodamage one and the shimmer, and would love to learn where you’d place your new one.

    Reply
    • seancostello

      A quick breakdown of the 3 reverbs:

      1. Eos: designed for plate and “hall” sounds, where the “hall” is more of an extension of the Lexicon hall sounds. Superhall is a pretty crazy algorithm design, that will never be duplicated, unless Audio Damage puts it into future products. The sounds were designed to Chris Randall’s and Adam Schabtach’s specifications. Fast attack, exponential decay. The modulation was designed to preserve the pitch of any instruments processed, with random pitch shifts minimized.
      2. ValhallaShimmer: big psychedelic reverb sounds. Very tailored towards slow attack, long decay, huge reverberant modulated washes. Has pitch shifting built in, for the classic “shimmer” sounds. The Eno influence cannot be overstated. The algorithms are inspired by some modern Eventide reverb designs, as well as some weird DSP quirks that I am heavily exploiting. Modulation is more random, and random pitch shifts are possible, similar to the older Lexicon modulation.
      3. ValhallaRoom: geared towards room sounds, where a “room” is anything from a small drum space, to concert halls, up to huge cavernous spaces. The inherent attack of Room is much faster than ValhallaShimmer, in keeping with the sound of real acoustic spaces, but the attack can be softened by the Early section, which can also create gated and chorus sounds. The algorithms are far different than both Eos and Shimmer, and take advantage of the optimized code base I developed for ValhallaShimmer, so there is a LOT of work being done versus the CPU cycles. I have done a fair amount of work to avoid the metallic artifacts commonly associated with the Diffusion control of most reverberation algorithms – I will be talking about that in a future blog post. Two of the algorithms (Large Room and Large Chamber) have pitch-preserving random modulation, while the other two (Medium Room and Bright Room) use a “deeper” modulation technique that can result in pitch drift, but can also get those big long washy decays.

        4. Once I release ValhallaRoom (or VRoom, as some people started calling it, which makes me happy) there will be demo versions available for audition, so you can hear the differences for yourself.

  • Cold oscillation

    Many many thanks Sean!

    Reply
  • Raffa

    I want to beta test! 😀

    Reply
  • Klemperer

    Thanks much, mate, for explaining the differences between the 3 reverbs in detail. I was offline for a few weeks (bavaria, near the alps^^) so only discovered it now. Thanks a lot! Looking forward to the windows-version.

    Reply
  • Vidarhjal

    A legend was born then.

    Reply

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