ValhallaRoom Tips and Tricks: Short Drum Rooms

ValhallaRoom can be used to generate a room sound that works well with acoustic drums. Some recommending starting points:

  • Use the Large Room or Large Chamber Reverb Mode. These provide an earlier onset of echo density.
  • Dial in the initial “size” of the room with PREDELAY. A standard trick is to use 15 to 30 milliseconds of predelay for the ambience mikes in a “live” drum room.
  • DECAY should be set anywhere from 0.3 seconds to just over 1 second.
  • HIGH CUT can be used to tame the high frequencies of the decay. A real room is often much darker than one would think, so don’t hesitate to set this as far down as 5000 Hz. A brighter room can be set between 6 and 9 kHz.
  • The DEPTH control is used to dial in the ratio of early to late energy. A setting of 50% is a good starting point.
  • The Early Size setting can be used to add a short amount of early reflection energy to the attack when set to the 10-30 msec range. A setting of 50 to 100 msec is useful in obtaining a slight amount of “gated” sound, or for simulating the flattening of the decay envelope produced by heavy limiting/compression or tape saturation. Note that the overall decay time will be extended by the Early Size setting.
  • The Early Send control is critical in shaping the early attack of short room sounds. By setting Early Send to 0.0, the initial attack can be varied between flattened and an exponential decay, by adjusting the DEPTH control to crossfade between the Early and Late reverbs. With Early Send set closer to 1.0, the Early Size setting will dominate the decay of both the Early and Late reverbs, producing a flattening of the initial decay.
  • The Late Size should be set to 0.5 or less, to produce the highest initial echo density.
  • The Late Bass should be set to 1.0X or less. Lower values add clarity to the decay.
  • In general, a more realistic room sound is obtained by keeping the Early and Late Mod Depth set to 0.0. However, if you are wanting to emulate the super chorused “room” of the EMT250, by all means feel free to crank the Mod Depth up!

A few example presets (copy to your clipboard, and select “Paste from clipboard” in the Preset menu to hear the sound), starting with a realistic small room:

[sourcecode language=”xml”]<ValhallaRoom pluginVersion="1.0.5" presetName="SmallishDrumRoom" mix="0.300000012" predelay="0.0299999993" decay="0.00300300308" HighCut="0.530201316" earlyLateMix="0.5" lateSize="0.330000013" lateCross="1" lateModRate="0.0909090936" lateModDepth="0" RTBassMultiply="0.153333336" RTXover="0.0909090936" RTHighMultiply="0.444444478" RTHighXover="0.530201316" earlySize="0.0193193201" earlyCross="0.100000001" earlyModRate="0.0909090936" earlyModDepth="0" earlySend="0" diffusion="1" type="0"/>[/sourcecode]

The next preset generates more of a compressed/gated early attack:

[sourcecode language=”xml”]<ValhallaRoom pluginVersion="1.0.5" presetName="SmashedDrumRoom" mix="0.300000012" predelay="0.0299999993" decay="0.00300300308" HighCut="0.463087261" earlyLateMix="0.5" lateSize="0.49000001" lateCross="1" lateModRate="0.0909090936" lateModDepth="0" RTBassMultiply="0.153333336" RTXover="0.0909090936" RTHighMultiply="0.444444478" RTHighXover="0.530201316" earlySize="0.067467466" earlyCross="0.100000001" earlyModRate="0.0909090936" earlyModDepth="0" earlySend="0" diffusion="1" type="0.333333343"/>[/sourcecode]

By setting the Early Send parameter of the previous preset to 1.0, the early attack is extended, to produce a bit of a slapback echo effect.

[sourcecode language=”xml”]<ValhallaRoom pluginVersion="1.0.5" presetName="SlapbackDrumRoom" mix="0.300000012" predelay="0.0299999993" decay="0.00300300308" HighCut="0.463087261" earlyLateMix="0.5" lateSize="0.49000001" lateCross="1" lateModRate="0.0909090936" lateModDepth="0" RTBassMultiply="0.153333336" RTXover="0.0909090936" RTHighMultiply="0.444444478" RTHighXover="0.530201316" earlySize="0.067467466" earlyCross="0.100000001" earlyModRate="0.0909090936" earlyModDepth="0" earlySend="1" diffusion="1" type="0.333333343"/>[/sourcecode]

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