Valhalla vs. Blackhole ribbon
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- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 269 posts since 12 Nov, 2011
I'm looking at Eventide Blackhole, as it's on sale. The thing that most interests me is the ribbon. I'm away from my studio PC at the moment, so I can't test, but do the Valhalla plugins (Ubermod especially) smooth out controller changes? I could just morph settings via Max4Live then.
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- KVRAF
- 3426 posts since 15 Nov, 2006 from Pacific NW
The different Valhalla algorithms have different amounts of smoothing for controller changes:
- ValhallaÜberMod: has the most smoothing. Most things are smoothed, either by a variable smoothing parameter (under the WARP tab) or by a fixed time constant for things like wet/dry changes. Switching between the various modulation MODEs isn't smoothed, but since the various algorithms all work from the same delay buffers, you'll still get some smoothed behavior.
- ValhallaShimmer: size changes are smoothed. Most other parameters aren't smoothed, but won't cause audible glitches when automated.
- ValhallaRoom, VintageVerb, Plate: most things aren't smoothed (other than things like wet/dry mix). This is due to the structure of these algorithms, where a mixture of interpolated and non-interpolated delays are used. The biggest glitches will be heard when automating the Size parameters for these algorithms, so this isn't recommended. Smoothing all the delays would result in nice tape delay effects, but would also double the CPU cost of the algorithms.
Hopefully this is useful info. My recommendation is to try the demos of the plugins in question, and see if they are suited for your workflow. If you like how things work, you can install the full versions in place of the demos, and preserve all automation settings.
Also, if you are looking at Blackhole (which is a darned fine plugin - Dan Gillespie did an excellent job of moving this into the plugin world), and want to compare it to a particular Valhalla plugin, ValhallaShimmer is the closest match. Take the existing BlackHole preset in Shimmer, set the diffusion to 0.824, and the color to Dark, in order to more closely match the settings of the Eventide plugin.
- ValhallaÜberMod: has the most smoothing. Most things are smoothed, either by a variable smoothing parameter (under the WARP tab) or by a fixed time constant for things like wet/dry changes. Switching between the various modulation MODEs isn't smoothed, but since the various algorithms all work from the same delay buffers, you'll still get some smoothed behavior.
- ValhallaShimmer: size changes are smoothed. Most other parameters aren't smoothed, but won't cause audible glitches when automated.
- ValhallaRoom, VintageVerb, Plate: most things aren't smoothed (other than things like wet/dry mix). This is due to the structure of these algorithms, where a mixture of interpolated and non-interpolated delays are used. The biggest glitches will be heard when automating the Size parameters for these algorithms, so this isn't recommended. Smoothing all the delays would result in nice tape delay effects, but would also double the CPU cost of the algorithms.
Hopefully this is useful info. My recommendation is to try the demos of the plugins in question, and see if they are suited for your workflow. If you like how things work, you can install the full versions in place of the demos, and preserve all automation settings.
Also, if you are looking at Blackhole (which is a darned fine plugin - Dan Gillespie did an excellent job of moving this into the plugin world), and want to compare it to a particular Valhalla plugin, ValhallaShimmer is the closest match. Take the existing BlackHole preset in Shimmer, set the diffusion to 0.824, and the color to Dark, in order to more closely match the settings of the Eventide plugin.
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- KVRist
- 487 posts since 19 Jan, 2003
For whatever it's worth, I would gladly pay some more money for a Valhalla reverb that works like this (and as modulation/automation friendly as possible in general), even if it was HQ versions of the existing plugins, or a kind of a best of selection of the current algorithms in this kind of HQ flavor and with VintageVerb style simple controls, or whatever makes sense to you (maybe it doesn't at allvalhallasound wrote:Smoothing all the delays would result in nice tape delay effects, but would also double the CPU cost of the algorithms.
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- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 269 posts since 12 Nov, 2011
Thanks for the info. I'm actually not a fan of huge reverbs like Blackhole, but the videos featuring the ribbon control intrigued me. Glad to hear Ubermod has a lot of smoothing, as it's the Valhalla plugin I use most.
