Octatrack FX kick ass

The only reverb I’ve got is my man’s cave. To get the tail longer I’ll open the door. For early reflections I’ll block the monitors with a pair of friends.

From: The Poor Musician’s Handbook

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A least is it natural and stereo. :slight_smile:
Reverb should expand stereo field. Not reduce it like mono reverbs.

I made a test a to make Dark Reverb stereo yesterday,
CUE OUT LR > IN AB
1 Thru with A, hard pan left for AMP and reverb 1 Thru with B, hard pan right for AMP and reverb
Better results, but still not great. Internally it would use 4 tracks. :sketchy:

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When I read this kind of statement from gear-loaded musicians, I get the feeling you get, when you hear a mono arp through the Space. Not saying that’s you, but there’s quite a few off them.

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If it’s all about cascading factory presets, I can agree if it’s being presented as a creation. Otherwise, everone is free to use his stuff in any way he likes it. Isn’t it all about having some fun, mostly?

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Totally disagree, at the opposite, I think it can be highly interesting to have 100% wet fx, dissolve / melt any basic sounds to make something new. Eventide Space is great for ambient stuff, pretty bad for realistic reverbs.
Strymon Big Sky, Empress Reverb have similar form factor / quality.

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If @darenager didn’t already planned it, we’ll make more only 2 fx challenges!

i personally enjoy the fx alot, there might not be alot, but w plocking, lfos, and scenes, neighbors, you can do ALOT

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then with like ANY outboard effects, it gets crazy

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I’ll routinely sum stereo reverbs to mono, because sometimes mono reverb sounds better. Or maybe I have no choice because it’s all being recorded mono through a 35 year old, of brand, solid state practice amp that came out of the trash, because a lot of the time that sounds best of all.

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I have 2 ears.

You have no way of backing up such an outrageous claim

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They sound okay, the filter is acutally sounding very good. But you cannot expect the quality of sound, say a reverb pedal has, that costs half of what the whole box costs.
I realy enjoy the effects for sketching and basic ground work, but if I need a specialist I use one.

One can easily improve upon the reverb quality by adding a cheap pre-owned external box using the cue outputs as fx sends. Comes in mind: the TC Electronics M300 (2 independant fx (delay and reverb) with KNOBS, no menu diving required, and very decend sound quality in stereo of course. Can be had for as low as 60€ on the used market. Other contendants are TC Electronics M-One XL (some menu diving required but very good sounding, street price 130€ average), the Lexicon MX series (the 400XL can be found for 150€). You can go further and add a cheap patchbay, a hardware compressor with a sidechain so that you can duck the 'verb to get HUGE reverbs yet not drown the source audio) and for a VERY reasonable budget you improve stuff quite a bit. Using the patchbay allows for quick reconfiguration so you don’t even sacrifice your cue outputs definitely, you go modular.

(Or get a Digitone and route the OT Cue outputs through the DN’s FX :slight_smile: )

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That’s pretty much my setup, but for all the instruments.
On the MX400 (which is in my setup) - don’t get the XL version unless you plan to use XLR plugs. I was almost fooled by it’s name. XL only means it has XLR sockets and not 1/4" jacks.

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Since almost everyone in the live-sound market switched to digital mixers with onboard FX or a Multirack (and similar) a couple of years ago the prices for decent used hardware fx dropped a lot. (With the exception of the very high end stuff that retains vintage aura). But all entry level - mid level fx can be had for ridiculously cheap and most of them, especially the entry level stuff from specialists like TC, Lexicon, Yamaha, Roland… had attained seriously high levels of performance.

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Agreed! I am super happy with the sound of the MX400 and it was around 200€ about 1,5 years ago. Other specialists like the empress, space or ventris weigh double that.

I recently had one for free. :wink:

Still have one too. But bought it full-price when it was released. Didn’t get much use because I really liked the knobs on the M300, too much menu-diving on the M-OneXL.

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Moot point anyway, because I just checked and the OT reverbs are not, in fact, mono at all (except Spring, which should be mono because being mono is one of the defining features of a real spring reverb). Easy enough to check - load some kind of short, mono impulse like a clap or snare, play it through one of the reverbs set to 100% wet with a long decay, record the left ant right outputs of the OT to a pair of mono tracks in your DAW, and then invert the polarity (“phase”) of one of the tracks. Plate and Dark don’t even come close to nulling (spring, which is actually mono, nulls perfectly).

What you might be hearing is that I’m pretty sure they’re running mono-to-stereo not stereo-to-stereo, so the dry signal is summed to mono before it hits the reverb algorithm (which is really common, especially in hardware), but the actual Dark and Plate algorithms are absolutely stereo.

Not really better or worse than true stereo-to-stereo. True stereo usually sounds really good if you’re listening on headphones or sitting right in the sweet spot of a pair of speakers, but in any other context it can just turn a mix into an indecipherable mess. I’d say mono-to-stereo like the OT does is almost always preferable if you’re playing live, and tends to translate better in general, but true stereo can sound great in the right context.

My guess is that Elektron chose mono-to-stereo partly because it might be a bit less processor intensive (I’m not actually sure if that’s true, though) but mainly because the majority of reverbs heard in the majority of recordings since the invention of stereo recording were mono-to-stereo (even actual stereo reverb chambers tended to use a single speaker with a pair of mics AFAIK).

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Another vote for mono to stereo here. Real acoustic spaces are not binaural.