Doctoring up an isolated version of Pearl Jam's "Black"
Reply #2 – 2014-11-21 14:41:30
By the way, if you tell us what software you're using we might be able to suggest suitable "Room Modelling" effects (even Cool Edit 96 was quite good for this) or simpler delay-attenuate-invert stereo processes (there are some Nyquist routines for Audacity I've tried and modified casually) or perhaps some VST plugins, that you might be able to play with to adjust the position of the main stereo image and the 'wetness' of the room (relative strength of successive delayed reflections). That may provide all the reverberation you need at the same time as sorting out the stereo image. I think you might be as surprised as I was the first time I tried it, how feelings of clarity you might normally associate with high treble boost EQ in the frequency response can appear almost magically when convolving the signal with a series of attenuated stereo bounces repeated every 25-75 ms or so. I've even found that some mono tracks (non music in both) that I converted to stereo and applied such an effect to, just seemed to have a lot more sparkle or 'fizz in the air' and an illusion of higher fidelity and better 'atmosphere' even though the resulting files had essentially identical spectrograms and a frequency response still hard capped at the Nyquist limit. Also, some stereo music cassette transfers had an added sheen of 'atmosphere' and sounded more "produced", especially on headphones, than the plain Dolby B transfers sounded without applying the fairly subtle stereo effect. I guess it's much like what acousiticians describe as the difference between a "dead" room and a "live" room. A few controlled first-reflections that cause little to no comb filtering make the room sound a lot brighter and livelier. Probably someone like Ethan Winer would be able to comment on this from years of experience. By the way, it's possible that the guitar sound is in part the result of comb-filtering effects from a particular kind of stereo reverb, though it sounds to me like you got the broad spectrum pretty well matched.