A few things: 1. The manual has some cool details about this plug-in. The UA manuals are always a good read. 2. The UA forums has a thread where a lot of detail, history and pictures are posted about the restoration work done to be able make this plug-in. 3. This is not a convo or IR reverb. Yes, it uses some techniques from those methods, but that's not all there is to it. There is mic emulation code and room emulation code also going on. 4. About the door opening, there are some plug-ins that can take a while to load (AKG-BX20, Capital Chambers, Hitsville Reverb) so UA uses a flashing light/open door to let you know that it's still loading. When the door closes you know the plug-in has started processing audio with the new settings.
Thank you for the details really cool. I love capitol chambers and abbey rooms. They’re in my session template. I can’t wait to take this one for a spin.
In Pisa, Italy there is a cilindrical building made of marble called Battistero di San Giovanni. There lays the longest natural reverb I ever heard. It was so long there was a sign begging visitors not to clap their hands. I was so impressed that I can perfectly remember its sound even 10 years after. I wish I would find an IR of that place.
I wonder what it would be like to hear how this would sound without golden ears. Just out of curiosity. It might help me understand why other mixes always sound so bad.. 😂
Wow this sounds SO natural, and definitely gives a vintage feel to the sound. So much variation to what you can achieve. I do think the UI is a bit much but it's also kind of cute. Will definitely be checking this out.
UA did the same thing with the Capitol Chambers. Fascinating classic reverb sound that we all know from the Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle sessions and many more.
Thank You Soooo MUCH! Yes, it's a great video; except that he's saying this is „Sandstorm“ by Darude, a famous electro/techno track. I don't know why he leads people into a completely wrong direction since i'm sure MANY people would LOVE this „demo“ track!!!😅
"Ville" is a common English sufix meaning city ot town, etc.. Related to the word "village". Motown nicknamed Hitsville - the city (or place, generally) where hits are made.
I've had signal analysis classes and it is amazing that a system's transfer function (input vs. output) can be fully characterized by an impulse response - but - the system must be linear and time invariant (LTI). I'm sure every physical space is not 100% linear to sound impulses, but the non-linearity must be small enough that it works for the most part.
The opening of the door is an indicator that processing is still taking place to model the new parameters. This is why you should not automate mic movement etc. of this reverb in real time as the results will be unpredictable. On UAD hardware you'll see it takes longer for the door to close as the parameter calculations take LONGER on the UAD SHARC hardware than they do in native (Spark) on a fast machine. (PS it's the same deal when you see the blinking bar under the the chamber name - it's calculating and the changed reverb profile is not live yet)
The door being open is a sign that the impulse response is being changed, it is not completely loaded until the door closes. It's a load time, Capitol Chambers has a similar light also.
Not just loading - calculating a new dynamic reverb model based on your slider positions. You'll notice the lag is much less on a fast PC on Spark than making the same change on UAD2 Hardware where the calculations take much longer than on a modern PC or Mac. I presume this (clever) approach is due to memory constraints on the UAD2 hardware.
I've been using this along with the Hitsville EQ for the past week. As someone who's been chasing the motown sound (I have the Acme Motown DI box which I hiiiiiighly recommend!), I love these. I tracked a band yesterday and put it on, but but they said, "we want a modern heavy sound." Understandable, so I won't use it for them. As a producer, the hardest thing about this plugin is that I have to refrain from using it on clients who want a modern sound.
uad really got their chambers down. I got the capitol, and it's such a lush and amazing sounding reverb. It eats up a quarter of my dsp though, which is why I often record it like a real chamber from the bad aux with the vocal, also has the interesting side effect of being more different to the vocal, because the vocal gets treated differently than the reverb.
Love convolution reverb! When ever im doing a location recording i allways capture ir's if practically possible. Use it alot in my mixes. A short ir to give realism together with other algorithmic reverbs is allways nice
It should be possible at some point to feed an image into a machine learning system and it will automatically generate a mathematically correct impulse response based completely on the image input.
As a longtime fan of Motown and as an African American I can tell you that Motown to us … it like abbey road and this and the Eq they have from hitsvile is a vintage production engineer’s wet dream lol. Because basically the team berry gordy put together back then basically was the original “bedroom producers” he took 2 story flat and made one the most iconic studios in American history… so much so that it’s a museum now… since Motown relocated to L.A. around 1971 … I’d love to try these plug-ins
Since you asked, The 'ville, in Hitsville would be pronounced like vil in villain. Rhymes with pill, or hill. The door indicates the time it takes for the different adjustments to become ready to interact with. It's great to hear gezellig used when discussing a reverb's ambiance. "Opposite of convolution...", I think algorithmic is the term you're referring to. Curious if you've worked with some of LiquidSonics' reverbs. They have some cool technology for allowing modifying and interacting with convolution reverbs.
From the user manual: "Hitsville Reverb Chambers is neither a general impulse response (IR) convolution reverb nor a typical algorithmic reverb. Instead, Hitsville Reverb Chambers utilizes Universal Audio’s breakthrough hybrid technologies, combining expertly sampled impulse responses with advanced algorithmic DSP techniques. "
Hello from Detroit MI USA! I've been there and taken the tour. A couple of my mentors were engineers there. Part of the tour is a demo of the live chamber that's actually in the attic of the house. As pointed out elsewhere, this was Berry Gordy's home studio. When you hear it it is without a doubt the sound of Motown. I wish that this program was available as just a VST that didn't require dedicated hardware. I am aware that IR's are also available for Altiverb by Audio Ease but again it's a very expensive plugin. I did try to get some IR's That could be used with other convolution reverbs [like ReaVerb] from one of my mentors that recently passed but there were licensing issues. Back in the 70's, I worked at Artie Fields Studio that had an entire empty theater as a stereo live chamber. It had 2 Altec VOT's on the stage and 2 EV 664's out in the audience. In order to adjust you had to go move the mics. There were tape marks on the floor where most of the house engineers preferred the mics. Because the studio was on a main thoroughfare and was located next to a fire station, there was always the chance of street noise leaking into the live chamber. Many masters were ruined. I do have the Waves version of the Abby Road Live Chambers and I find them useful. BTW: Impulse Responses can also be done by sweep tone.
According to UA's website, I don't think they used traditional convolution but rather a "proprietary Dynamic Room Modeling technology, an exclusive combination of physical modeling and advanced measurement techniques." Not sure what that means
I remember you once commenting, "harry potter business going on here". That might apply here?, it's spooky how accurately it captures what we're seeing. It proves not all convolutions are the same........this is exceptional!
This sounds beautiful! So warm! I want to visit Hittsville too! The UAD hittsville EQ is really nice! They offer it as part of the subscription which is nice. I usually don't like subscriptions but.... the uad has so many good things. I find reverb fascinating. There are so many different sounds you can get and i think impulse responses are fun. I'm wokring on a classical project using a response from a church in the netherlands.
I actually prefer the Hitsville to the Capitol Chambers plugin. Another added bonus is the Hitsville takes far less DSP than Capitol Chambers. Pair that with the fact that you do not need to be connected to your UAD hardware to run it and that is why this new Hitsville is the winner in my mind.
Love the sound, but you need to be connected to the internet and that's a no go for me. I have the subscription at the moment but will not keep it once it expires. Even Adobe gives you a couple of days without connection to use their stuff if your internet is f***ed.
@@GRedit1000 Oh wow, I didn’t realize that. Yeah, I can see how that would be a deal breaker for some people. That doesn’t effect me so much, but that does seem less than ideal for certain folks. I don’t know why they just don’t integrate an iLok type authentication system. Then you could run the Spark plugins without an internet connection and without being connected to your Apollo interface. I refuse to use LUNA for that very reason. I hate the fact that I can’t open a session on the go because I am not hooked up. That’s a deal breaker for me.
Definitely not Sandstorm by Darude at least from my lookup. Maybe this is an inside joke as that lookup was an electronic track. To bad. Very nice piece of music.
It's Hitsville like Nashville, Tennessee and you also need to go to Nashville to take a tour of Blackbird studio and the Quonset Hut studio in Music row where all the labels are located.
I wonder how it compares to the Abbey Road chambers, which is my favorite. it sounds natural and you can manually set the left/right delay to get width
Mary Wells My Guy ending with the finger snaps has the best showcase of that concrete room in my opinion. Don't know which chamber they used. I always thought they had just one up there. The My Guy ending finger snaps really highlight the reverb at Motown Detroit.
I believe the waves IR has a very famous club from New York City, called the bottom line, which no longer exists, and the club tonic, started by John Zorn. It also has radio city music Hall. I did a stereo recording from the mix position when I mixed a show there in 2005 and was able to compare the impulse to my recording. I got a more impressive product using impulse lol. I was able to do the same thing with the Royal Swedish opera House in Stockholm, altiverb has that one. IRs are nice in simple arrangements. not as much in busy ones.
The only part of a reverb chamber that has any real dynamic nonlinearity is the electronics on either end. You can use your favorite rusty screw plugins on either side of an IR to get that. Actual rooms are linear up to an SPL which would kill people or way below every noise floor. There’s also not that much randomness to it. It’s very complex sometimes, and algorithmic verbs use randomness to simulate complexity, but a chamber like this doesn’t have things moving around and just changing randomly.
Well I mean the pin drop is barely above the noise floor and the reflections from it even lower, and of course the nuke destroys the room . For literally all practical purposes, room responses are linear.
Man, it would be nice if you actually read the manual. All of your guesses on how this plugin was made are answered in detail there. It's not impulse responses, although they are used.
Through UA Spark, their subscription service, a select few of the plug-ins run natively off your computer without UA hardware. Hitsville Reverb is included!
I enjoyed spelunking down all the comments here. Numerous recommendations. Most of which I hadn't ever heard of. I use Valhalla delay. One of these days, I'll try UA's Spark. I can only afford so many subscriptions.
As soon as you enabled the plug-in, my jaw pretty much dropped like yours did. "Done." I'm not an engineer or producer, but I know what I like. And that sounded so great with that particular track. Jazz at Hitsville, USA. Whodathunk it?
the open door correlates with the room selector blinkink. i think they are indicating that the plugin is waiting for you to stop moving sliders before the changes take effect
Not just for you to stop moving sliders - the lag after you've stopped moving them while the new reverb parameters are calculated - Hitsville builds a new model dynamically every time you change something - this is to avoid needing a huge amount of memory to hold every iteration of parameters, memory which is simply not available on the UAD SHARC hardware.
No not guns or balloons!..... A great "shot" sound can be created by a starter pistol. They are very loud, safe, and don't shoot anything.... but still be really careful! Dang.. this is a nice sounding reverb.... tempting!
I'm looking for the Jazz track but it's not coming up. The only song titled "Sandstorm" by Darude I find is a techno track. Never mind found it! "42nd Street Shuffle" by Rikard From
this looks like the capitol records plug-in adapted for this space. That's a wonderful Reverb as well. I believe they claim it's more algorithmic than impulse.
Impulse response is what it is, so I think it was good to capture that space, or really any space, However, I feel if they had the time to do the door thing, they had time to make the sound of the plugin better... or make the door do something... like take impulses with the door open and let your leave it open closed or half way...
