Reverb send level

[micahhaun]

Something I'd really like to see in Helix is the ability to control the volume going into reverbs so it works like sending it to an aux channel reverb. That input volume would not affect the dry signal at all. It would only need to add one extra control slider to the reverbs and likely wouldn't require a meaningful bump in DSP.

 

The reason this would be great is it would allow setting the reverb level much more smoothly than is now possible and make a single reverb block much more flexible.

 

I can currently set the wet/dry with snapshots, but that has some problems. It's a very abrupt change if I make a big move on wet/dry. There's a sudden and obvious change in sound because it's just a mix change and nothing within the reverb is changing, nor is anything smoothly fading.

 

If I were able to affect the sound level hitting the reverb, even an instantaneous change in level would naturally be smoothed out by the reverb itself. I also would also be cleaner bringing up the reverb amount because only new notes would have the louder reverb, existing tails would continue as they were. Similarly, cutting the reverb send lower would allow exiting reverb tails to smoothly fade while new notes stop contributing as much.

 

Right now the only way to get a setup like this is to put the reverb on another path. Set to 100% wet with a gain block in front of it. This does work, but it uses an extra block and wastes an entire path. Another strategy is to have multiple reverb blocks at different settings with tails enabled, then switch them on and off for different sounds. This wastes a lot of DSP and block space.