E-verb, Altiverb, Au verb How do you evaluate your reverb?

[RMC206]

How do you evaluate your reverb? When I started, there was a big room with a mic on one end and a speaker on the other end. You could have more or less etc. So some people hate one and love a different one. When I adjust the pre delay to the tempo of the song the reverb blends very well. Add some EQ and it's pretty. What do you all listen for when you pick a reverb?

[monkey man]

Smoothness (lack of graininess in tails), believable early reflections and lack of "honk" (mid-range harshness, if you will).

[Matt Searles]

I kind of approach mixing like painting.. which is to say I like to throw a lot of paint around and search for happy accidence.. and sorta making my work out of a kind of dialectal relationship to what's being created... So in the end I'm looking to create something that's kind of "out there" and interesting for that.

Normally I have this preconception that I'll have different "reverb categories." These are like sizes of space, or whatever. The Aux track the reverb is on could have EQs or a compressor associated with it.. and depending on how crazy I'm feeling.. who knows what else. When it comes the actual production.. I have my instruments moving in and out of space.. varying sense of depth.. and the whole sense of space of the virtual sound stage can evolve.. so it's a bit like having camera angels as we move through sonic space.

At the moment I'm using the EQs and Compressors of DP and Liquid Mix 16.. plus the reverbs could come from DP, Ableton LIve, Reason, Kore, or stuff from the NI-Komplete bundle. I've been thinking of investing in Altiverb / the All in bundle.. and I've been looking at Breverb. In my longer range studio plans I'm thinking about investing in high quality microphones, pres, and some sorta speaker kinda thing.. and experimenting with various real acoustic spaces. Thinking about putting together a portable rig so I can really go crazy with the process. Thinking about playing with binaural recording as a part of this true.

So I guess my evaluation process is one of.. chance sometimes.. as if to say any combination of things will have certain implications, and how you deal with those implications can have interesting results. On the other end of the spectrum I might actually think about what I'm doing.. do things along more conventional lines. The process is usually about integrating these two approaches...

Learning is a real key thing for me in all this.. with the goal of developing a lot of different, hopefully idiosyncratic approaches, that can help me develop a mature kind of sound / set of techniques.

[resolectric]

My favorite (read "most often used") Reverb is a VST TC Native Reverb Plus. Cheap.
About 8 or 9 years old.

I bought Waves IR1 recently, about two years ago. Expensive. Much better than the TC Native but i still prefer using the TC. Don't know why.

Why do i say the Waves IR1 is better than the TC?
I often do orchestral and choral recording in churches or auditoriums around the country and i get the ambient sound from the spaces where i get to record.
Recently i tried to emulate the reverberation from one of the recordings with the TC Native. No way, it didn't get there.
I then switched to the IR1 and it was so much more "tweakable", so many useful parameters, that after a few minutes i had a very aproximate reverb sound emulated by the IR1.
That's what i call better: the capability of recreating real spaces.

Still, i use the TC Native so much more because of how easy it is to program and how well it falls into a mix. I only use it in modern music production. Whenever there's some classical production i'm working on that needs added "space", i go for the IR1.