Valhalla Vintage Verb is here

My, how the time flies! We’ve been keeping busy here at Valhalla DSP HQ.

The big news was the release in December 2012 of the latest plugin, ValhallaVintageVerb:

ValhallaVintageVerb1970s ValhallaVintageVerb is a collection of 9 reverb algorithms, inspired by vintage hardware reverbs such as the Lexicon 224/PCM70/300/480L, as well as the EMT250. The GUI continues the “superflat” aesthetic of the earlier Valhalla plugins, with Kristin adding lots of beautiful color and graphic design flourishes to the mix. The parameters have been carefully chosen to balance flexibility with ease of use.

ValhallaVintageVerb has received a great reception so far! Here’s a few reviews:

http://www.musicradar.com/reviews/tech/valhalladsp-vintageverb-574692

http://voxcaliber.com/review-valhalla-dsp-vintage-verb/

In other news, I am currently working on the AAX ports of the Valhalla DSP plugins [EDITORIAL NOTE: this is an old blog post, and the AAX ports have been done for a few years now]. The main tasks involved are updating my code to use the latest Juce code, and signing the AAX plugins with the Pace Eden copy protection. The progress is a bit slow right now, due to some issues Pace is having with their new copy protection system, so I am waiting for their issues to get resolved to get back on the ports. I’ll be sending out updated versions of the plugins to all users as the AAX ports are finished, as the VST/AudioUnit/RTAS builds will be updated at that time.

Comments (5)

  • All the best of luck! I own your Shimmer Room and Ubermod, plus the EOS, and was just put off due to learning it was a “postmodern” reverb. Joke aside, (our german postmodernists are in the vast majority hate-speaking snobs who could not survive without the daily thought they were supercool and all the rest, which they urgently need, all idiots. The bad thing is – they don’t believe themselves so have to “update” their feeling of being the only cool – at least weekly^^) – I’ll buy that too.

    Your plugins are simply amazing, and I bought each one after the first even without demoing, something I never did before. So all the best to you, and some more last word about our postmodernists – here they are not a reverb of the 70s and 80s^^ but a university mainstream of the 90s and 00s (that indeed fits well) that battled against all who warned social injustice was on the rise.
    As a result – what they hated was, ironically, called “70s” and “80s”. And as result we had no intellectual majority or at least bigger minority who at least told people that our wages got down severely. Germany has now 23% working in underpaid jobs. This has, indeed, a vast influence on the horrible situation in southern Germany, where Greeks, people from Portugal, Spain and in more countries deeply suffer. Our postmodernists – of course – laugh about this and feel they have nothing to do with it. Might take another 25 years to find people who actually work empirically and tell universities about that kind of fragile egos. It’s never good to leave the power to politicians alone, and that’s what these people helped to do.
    So – ha ha – to cut a long but necessary story short: I’ll buy your VINTAGE verb! The next one I’d buy could be called Monty Python’s reverb. That would be a great name^^.

    Reply
    • I think that “postmodern” must have a different meaning in the US as opposed to Germany. The term “postmodern” usually refers to buildings built after the modernist movement of the 1920s through 1950s. These buildings tended to depart from the “white box” architecture of modernism, and added ornamental details that had been found in older buildings. In this sense, “modern” doesn’t mean “the present” but rather “a certain style that was called modern,” and “postmodern” means “the stuff that came after the modern style that broke the rules of modernism.”

      I’ve got more to write about “postmodern reverb,” but you’ve inspired me enough to write a blog post about it.

  • edit, edit:….the horrible influence of ignored social injustice is not ugly for southern Germany, of course^^- but for southern Europe. Sorry for the typo. I have to forget about those horrible people now, I met a few thousands too much – and make some music. But it indeed is not too funny, thinking about those fragile egos.

    Reply
  • Brandon Macdonald

    Kudos to your wife on the design! 🙂 Does she do the design for Room/Ubermod/Freq Echo?

    Cheers

    Reply
  • Although I hardly just started reading about and listening to Vintageverb I know this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. And then I see ValhallaRoom which seems even more interesting. I find your texts about reverb and tips and tricks interesting too.

    One thing I was wondering about is your expert view on predelay. I noticed you wrote that you left out predelay in ValhallaShimmer and for good reasons it seems. I also know from the manual of Lexicon 480 (page 3-2) that Lexicon considered the use of predelay being “unnatural” and they therefore implemented SIZE, SPREAD and SHAPE to tailor the early buildup in a more natural way. Although they kept the pre delay parameter their advice was to not use it for natural reverbs.

    Vintage Verb has two shape parameters (size and attack) and I guess these affect the buildup in a high extend. Are these to be viewed as the “natural” parameters for the buildup like in Lexicon and the pre delaybeing more an extra synthetic parameter or is Vintage Verb designed in another fashion where predelay is considered being a “natural” part of the algorithm?

    Sorry for this long post, but I find this a very interesting topic. I guess I agree with Lexicon’s view but that might be a theoretical standpoint that’s less interesting in the practical use of delay. It would be interesting to hear what an expert reverb designer thinks about predelay.

    (Oh by the way my first name is Tor so I guess I’ll go to Valhall when i die 🙂

    Reply

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