Outdoor Reverb/Delay?

Question

I'm doing some sound design for a scene that takes place outside in front of a farmhouse, but all of the sound for it is being recorded indoors. I've got the outdoor ambiance sounds covered just fine, but the ambient reverb/delay is where I'm stumped.

Even though this is in a big open area, I know it's not just echoless and dead, because I know that if I shout in a field rather than in a padded room, it sounds way different. There is some natural echo (which has me leaning toward using a delay), but I'm having a hell of a time getting the settings right. Part of it is EQ, because I know that the echoed sounds would lose a lot of the high frequencies from the source, and I know it shoud be a longer delay, but everything I come up with sounds like it's happening in a cave rather than in a field.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

To add to the other ideas here, it's often the layered complexity of outdoor reflections that gives them a natural feel. Real spaces, indoor or outdoor, never sound exactly like a reverb preset. I find it fun to design a bunch of options and mix-and-match—my usual strategy is to take 3-4 sends from the dialog/FX tracks and create corresponding aux tracks, each with a different spatial effect. Then I can use the 3-4 faders to balance those effects until I get something natural, or start with something new.

My best suggestion is to go for a walk and clap your hands a lot. It sounds basic (and potentially weird, depending on your neighbors) but it's a really good way to get a feeling for how sound actually interacts with structures and open spaces outdoors.

A few years back I heard gunshots from hunters while spending time near Yosemite National Park. It's so dang quiet there that I could clearly hear the characteristics of the echoes through the forest. Now when designing an echoey open space, I always make sure to have a low-pass filter in the feedback loop to mimic the continuous loss of high-frequencies over large distances and on reflections.

Answer 2

Usually a convo verb can give decent results, as Dave mentioned. I find that even with that, it all comes down to the predelay and late delay parameters which 'sell it' though primarily, in my opinion. Predalys and late delays, and how they're used, are what give the reverb that character "slap" off the walls (or, the trees) that we recognize in real life. With convo verbs I tend to gravitate toward IRs of spring reverbs, followed by plates as a second, not often do I actually find an exterior IR that I like.

For what it's worth, a 0.9ms Predaly is good for a studio space, a 16ms or so feels nice for a big house room. Give something in the 70-150ms range anf see what happens. Or try keeping the predelay around 50ms or so and fire up the late delay to about 140ms - that gives an interesting lush slap reverb tail when I used it on TLSpace with a spring verb to verb some city dogs

Answer 3

Have you tried any convolution reverbs? Most of those would have an outdoor sample. I know the stock one in logic has a few. Convolution is really IMO the best approach for recreation of a real space like this. Good luck dude.

Answer 4

I've used the "Outdoorverb" by xoxos on a few projects and have had good results. It's a freeware VST plugin for PC, so unfortunately PT (and MAC) cannot run it. It's a tap delay-type unit which incorporates a pitch variance. It's an interesting little plugin. Recommended if you can run it.

http://rekkerd.org/xoxos-releases-outdoorverb/

Good luck with the project!