kBeyond
TL;DW: kBeyond is a recital hall.
kBeyond in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kBeyond.zip (609k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Turns out there’s a technology to beat all AI: the genetic algorithm. GA. And if you know how to steer it, you can do anything.
kBeyond is a first real example of what that can do. It’s two different reverb matrices in one plugin, the first generating early reflections and the second expanding them into an eerily believable acoustic space.
I did it by telling the genetic algorithm to try millions upon millions of different matrices, and evaluate them in various ways. Like, constructing all the end-result echoes from the Householder matrix, and then seeing how many of those combinations were primes (people are used to putting primes in the individual delays of the matrix, but it does nothing! It’s how many of the end results add up to a prime). Or measuring the gaps between echo returns, and seeing if they’re similar or all different (this increases the depth and naturalness of the sound). Or working out what the intersample peaking of the reverb will be, and preferring lower treble energy out of it. Or wanting the first echoes to happen almost immediately, which means there has to be a path through the matrix that is very short.
I put together a small hall out of this, without too much furniture or weird architecture (yes, I can specify that too) and it’s yours now. It’s using a 3×3 and a 6×6 Householder matrix inside, so before it even gets into regeneration it’s producing 1.25 million echo returns (previous kVerbs before VerbSixes? 3125, for not much if any CPU savings). It’s using Bezier undersampling to sound right at high sample rates with no penalty in CPU to speak of. It’s got just enough controls to adapt to many needs, but is essentially simple to use: keep things near default, tune your RT60 and loudness of early reflections and the filtering on the deep reverb to tune the brightness of the hall. Use Derez if you want to scale it up while darkening it.
There will be more grandiose spaces (heck, you have VerbSixes for that). But in certain ways, there won’t be more impressive spaces for a while, because whatever sound you put into kBeyond, it ought to sound like you’ve just gone on the road and into a hall and put up some mics. It’s not even a texture, it’s just there, invisibly, making things real.
Compare this to, say, ClearCoat, and you can see why I didn’t stop there.
Expect more. All the reverbs kinda need an update now that I can do this…
Airwindows Consolidated Download
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All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
Really cool, I will try out all the tools you give to us sooner or later as always. I am all in for another take on the kplates or whatever dense and intense reverb could be done, same with really short ones. The Amps or NotAmps are such a win too, pointyguitar works nice on voices too. Peak Airwindows right here, exciting!
Dear Chris,
that’s really a big one! Thanks a lot!!
I couldn’t other than publishing my admiration about your work on the Linux Musicians forum here:
https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=28475
It says:
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BEYOND ALL REVERBS! Another stroke of genius by Chris from Airwindows
Chris Johnson, alias Airwindows, again with a stroke of genius!
Only 609 kB of code, processor load in my tests is extremely low, but a huge result. He explains and demonstrates by a piano sound his newest reverb development, which he refers to as “a recital hall” in a new video, linked from his new kBeyond plugin page: https://www.airwindows.com/kbeyond/ .
I tested it on my classical guitar takes, and, what should I say, I am really impressed. So much, that I just cite his own statement from his web site about what he tried to achieve, and in my opinion fully achieved: “it ought to sound like you’ve just gone on the road and into a hall and put up some mics. It’s not even a texture, it’s just there, invisibly, making things real”.
I found it to need some very careful adjustment at the very low end of possible Regen values (I use only a value of 0.042 on a scale of available values up to 1.0) to get that subtle reverb effect bringing the recording taken in a dry room full of carpets back to live. But with that revival my record indeed sounds now like me live hearing myself playing my classical guitar in a lovely sounding small room. The replay now sounds as if the recording would have taken place in a designated recital room. Well, with lots of room for the plugin to apply higher Regen values, I imagine that others will indeed be able to find also nice textures of huge concert hall reverb becoming generated.
Thanks a lot, Chris!
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As you can derive from my review of your plugin, it could be a nice option to add to your “recital hall” plugin a switch, which would make it easier accessible also as a “recital room” plugin: how about a switch applying to the Regen value a scaling factor of 0.2, so that adjustments between current values of 0.0 to 0.2 would be easier to fine grade them as a user adjusting values between 0 and 1 on the Regen slider but then finding applied as Regen actually original values between 0 to 0.2 ?
My demo: https://youtu.be/3bsMhZAtAaA
kBeyond is my favourite, and go-to, reverb now :)