Some details

Hi,
is there anyone, who can explain me the meaning of the density choice 1…6 at the top of verbiage an the meaning of detecting dry or wet or s/chain at the bottom?
Thanks
Rainer

I’ll let Scott tell you about density, because the best answer I could give would be ‘makes the reverb more or less dense’ which I suspect you’ll find less than useful!

Regarding the sidechain : the gate works on the wet signal, but the sidechain that determines the opening/closing of the gate can be triggered from several places. Lets take the example of using Verbiage for doing a big 80s gated snare*, since that seems to be a popular use for the plugin:

  • dry - Back in the day, the engineer would roll up the sleeves on his linen suit and make his gated reverb by splitting the signal that he sent to the reverb unit and also sending it to the sidechain of the gate that he’d placed after that reverb. So, no matter what settings he made on the reverb unit, the reverb gating would always be triggered by the dry snare sound. He would set a fairly low threshold and then use the ‘hold’ control on the gate to vary the length of his reverb ‘bash’ in a consistent and predicable way, judged to work well with the tempo of the track. This technique has previously been an effort to recreate with plugins, and even impossible on some hosts. With Verbiage its easy, just set the gate detect to ‘dry’, short attack and release, and work that hold control.
  • wet - This is much the same as putting a normal gate after the reverb. The gate’s opening and closing is determined by the wet signal, so your carefully adjusted gate time and threshold settings will need to be adjusted if, at a later time, you tweak the settings of the reverb. You can (more or less) achieve your gated snare this way, it’ll just be a bit fiddly and annoying to set up. If, on the the other hand, you just want to gate the reverb so it doesn’t wash over quiet sections of the track, using the ‘wet’ setting will work nicely.
  • sidechain - the signal appearing at Verbiage’s sidechain input (inputs 3&4) will be used to gate the reverb. Use for special effects or (after some creative routing within your host) when you are using verbiage in series after a plugin that may reduce your chances of getting a clear trigger signal for the ‘dry’ setting. Returning to our gated snare example, this might be putting a compressor and/or distortion before verbiage for extra machine-like uniformity to your ‘bash’ (if you like that sort of thing), and then manually routing the dry snare signal to Verbiage’s sidechain input to do the triggering.

I hope that helps!

*WARNING : Using gated snare sounds can make some people hate you.

For the short technical answer, changing the density affects the number of comb and allpass filters that make up the reverb. Higher density = more filters = more complex reverberation, but ALSO = more CPU use.

If you’re looking for simple room emulation, try 1 or 2…you might not like the sound soloed, but it may just be the thing when it sits in the mix. You’ll definitely like the lower CPU hit.

Scott

Hi, Scott and White Tie,
many thanks for the detailed und very helpfull informations I got !!

Rainer

Hi,
sometimes you don’t need a gated reverb and so on some reverbs you can switch off the gate.
In Verbiage you can’t. But I suppose the gate is switched off, when you turn the four faders to their minimum and set detect to dry.
Is that correct?
Rainer

When the gate threshold is pulled all the way down (-90 dB) the gate turns off altogether. It doesn’t particularly matter what the other gate parameters are set to.

Scott

Hi,

Is Verbiage “true” stereo & does it have any Plate algorithm ?

Thanks.
B

Yes, Verbiage is true stereo in that it has totally independent processing chains, although maybe you’d want to call it dual mono. That being said, you can use the early reflections, input l/r blend, and output width controls to blend the inputs and outputs so that each side of the reverb contains more or less cross-bleed from the opposite side, yielding pretty much any variation of mono, dual mono, or stereo that you’d like.

Asking whether it has a plate “algorithm” doesn’t really apply, since it’s not really physically modeling any particular piece of hardware, but using the appropriate combinations of number of filters and size parameters can yield a pretty decent plate sound.

I hope that helps,

Scott

Why not calling it “-inf” then (instead of -90 dB)?

Because I’m afraid of infinite space.

huddles in the corner of the room for safety…

:slight_smile: