Outdoor Delay Tips?

[Amo Audio]

I'm not a post guy, but I'm trying my hand at some post stuff for personal use. I was just wondering if somone could answer a very basic question for me... I've heard that to make things sound realistic outdoors you don't use any reverb, just delay. Is this true? If so, anybody have any tips on delay settings for me? i need a voice to sound far away in a forest, and i also need some close up vocals too. Would there be any early reflections of trees maby?

I'm really new to this so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

[RobMacki]

Well if you think about it, the delay is caused (naturally) by hard reflective surfaces, buildings etc. So to make it believeable I would think you would want to emulate in audio what is visually on camera or established behind camera. That's my thoughts on it. Maybe others will add enlightenment.

BTW TL Space had an IR called "out in the trees".

[Amo Audio]

Sorry i forgot to mention that it is not for film or TV, its a radio play, so i have no visual refrence. kinda makes things a bit more difficult not to have something to look at and emulate i think... sorry for leaving out that pretty big detail...

[minister]

it is really hard to do with delays. if you have more than one, then delay some of the delays, but be careful of levels becasue it can quickly sound fake. so experiment with multiple early and late reflections... if you tuck this into the ambience, you can get it to work somewhat convincingly. try putting a compressor on the delays and keying in the ambience so they get tucked into the bkgd...

but there is some thing just OPEN about the outdors that is more than just delay.

a sure fire way is to take a speaker out into the woods and record the voice playing through it. worldize it. to my ears, works better than impulse verbs.

[TVPostSound]

1130 feet per second!!!!

[Amo Audio]

I tried layering delays and then putting the delays through some TruVerb early reflections, but it just sounds too reverby and fake (as you mentioned). Less layered delays would probably cut down on the thickness and make it sound less like reverb, but what kind of delay times should i try? Right now I'm hovering arround the 150-200 ms area... is this way off?

If I had a laptop and an Mbox i would definately record in the woods, but i have a G5 and a 002 with a 600lb VGA monitor... I can see that would definately be the best option though... If i was doing this for money i would probably track down some gear (portable DAT or something) and go for a hike.

[FlorianE]

Trueverb's Early Reflections (without the reverb tail) still will try to model a room, i.e. a space enclosed by walls.
Even a dense forest will present a much more complex reflection pattern.
If you're tired of setting multitap delays, and plan to go out to the forest anyway: why not record a few impulses of your favorite spots and feed them to a convolution reverb?
There is also a great little software called Impulse Modeler (Voxengo), which will allow you to design your own favorite forest, and then generates the resulting impulse response (stereo, unfortunately no more).

Cheers
Florian

[Richard Fairbanks]

My thoughts:

First, the vocal performance has to be right. It is often impossible to get a softly or intimately spoken line to be convincing at a distance, because that is not what happens in life. Next, the voice must be eq'd differently to sound distant, again emulating what we hear in life. Roll off or hi-pass at 100-200hz, sometimes even higher. Emphasize midrange, around 2-4khz, although this is sometimes not as effective with female voices. Sometimes it also helps to roll off above 8khz instead of boosting midrange, or sometimes a combination of all things. Often, a slight lowering of the volume helps too.

If your dialog should be calling through the forest, I would put in a single delay between 80 and 160ms, often without feedback, but sometimes with 5-10% feedback, whatever sounds right. This gets me most of the way there, but there is always tweaking to be done. I sometimes find it is helpful to blend in some reverb, and I expect this would be appropriate in your forest. I often like a plate-style that includes plenty of sound in the upper midrange, not hyped but also not "roomy". Too much will sound totally fake. I would start with a verb decay time of around 2 seconds, but this depends a lot on the quality of reverb and is only a starting point. It is really to fill in behind the delay, not to sound like reverb. Then I find all settings may need to be tweaked on a line by line basis. A spooky show would probably want to be different than a straight drama.

Basically, reverb and delay must be used very sparingly or it will sound fake, except for those few "calling across the canyon" type of moments. It is not uncommon for me to listen the next day and tweak the overall levels again. Again, I find that performance and eq must be right or delay and verb will sound fake.

[geitz]

I've had good luck starting with a Renaissance Reverb preset called "4 diffused reflections" under the "Echoverb" group of presets. A little tweaking will be required, of course. Definitely also refer to the EQ adjustments that Richard Fairbanks brought up. Also, I absolutely agree with Richard about the vocal projection. Having the voice project as one would in that situation goes a LONG way towards making it believable, much more than any EQ or 'verb does.

Good luck,
Greg

[Amo Audio]

Thank you all for the very usefull information. I'm not at my studio but I'll try all that stuff next chance I get. I'm not sure how convincing i can even get it because the actors weren't recorded in the studio. they recorded at one of my school's studios with a horrible sounding iso booth, with some horrible sounding indoor reverb... I guess theres not much I can do about that... hopefully the delay and other effects will cover it up...