I use these as a baseline, tweaking slightly to taste. to my ears they sound far more realistic than what's included. Why neither of these are included as presets is beyond me. I can tell you that from listening to decades of well-recorded commercial piano recordings of all musical genres, some of the nicest sounding recordings of the past seem to have plate reverbs applied to them, even if the use of plate reverbs was not specified in a given album's liner notes.įor Valhalla Room I highly recommend following the advice given by its creator in this article: At best, every reverb - regardless of price - is an approximation of how much we are willing to suspend reality and believe we are hearing the real thing. Restated, I have never found a reverb that fools my ears (or will fool your ears) into believing I am in the real acoustic space of a piano in a definable room. Throughout all of this playing around, I can state confidently that I find NO SINGLE external reverb vendor, nor ANY SINGLE setup or modified preset within any given brand of external reverb - to which I can define as 'best'. I have also found it extremely useful to set up more than one auxiliary bus for more than one type of reverb, such that I can use DAW faders in Logic Pro X (pronounced 'ten', not the letter 'X') to capture the early reflections of one space and blend it with longer reverb tails of a different space. The one exception for using a wet cathedral sound was several years ago, when I recorded Debussy's 'The Engulfed Cathedral.' For example, within Altiverb (very, very good, btw), some days I might prefer Pianoteq's sound with the impulse response of a sampled plate reverb other days I might select a particular studio on still other days, I might prefer the impulse response of a small club or a hall, and 'almost' never a church or cathedral for a piano.

(This list is not limited to only these five products just stated.)Įven within each reverb product, my opinion of what sounds best or most appropriate. My opinions seem to vary over time between some of the more expensive convolution reverbs such as Altiverb 7 and Waves IR Full, and algorithmic reverbs such as Acon Digital Reverb and Lexicon or Quik-Quak Ray Space.

I take no definitive stance as to what the 'best' third-party reverb is for Pianoteq or any other virtual instrument, for that matter.

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