Remove reverb

I’ve got a number of SATB voices and all have massive reverb. I want to play without any reverb at all initially. How to do?

What sample library?

Dorico’s mixer has a Reverb track: you can turn that down; or inidivually change the FX level for each instrument.

Some VSTs may also have their own reverb in their panel, e.g. Noteperformer, ARIA Player…

Using HALion Sonic SE. I’ve turned Reverb channel in mixer down to zero, and even tried muting the channel. Also taken all reverb settings to zero in sample library for all channels, but nothing seems to work.

Have you loaded any specific sounds directly in the HSSE interface? The Olympus Choir Micro sounds are not completely dry, so there will be some reverb even if you send nothing to the Reverb channel. Some of the sounds, e.g. the one called Gregorian, is absolutely drenched with reverb by default and you can’t reduce it because it’s baked in to the original recording.

I’m mostly using Marcato oo, although what I actually want is just a short bah sound. Is there anything else I can use here with no reverb?

The Gregorian voices are nice🙂

What is that?

It’s one of the Vocal sample set.

Yes, no doubt, but if you read the thread, you’ll see that I’m looking for a reverb-free sound!

I don’t think any of the sounds in Olympus Choir Micro are completely dry, I’m afraid. You could try having a look through the other vocal sounds included with the HALion Sonic SE factory set; the GM-style vocal ooh and aah sounds are probably a fair bit drier.

In my example I used Spitfire’s Eric Whitacre Choir - (almost) without reverb.
He comes from home very dry.

In terms of price, the Originals: Epic Choir by Spitfire is a good alternative - in addition to the usual ones, it also has various short patches with consonate/vocal combinations. Everything can also be completely dry (close). In the usual Spitfire quality.

I only use Dorico to prepare scores, arrange and compose - never for performance purposes, so I have little interest in perfecting the sound, and therefore don’t want to have to buy anything. It’s inconvenient not to have a reverb-free voice sample set, but I managed with Garritan PO for years which has no voices at all (the early version I had), so I’ll make do with the HALion set.

@Ed_Addis if you don’t want to buy anything then I suppose my post is irrelevant. but it is worth mentioning for others perhaps that I know of at least six VST plugins for de-reverberation, all of which work pretty well. It’s amazing that this can be done at all. Such things exist. I just happened to be doing a job which required heavy reverb removal a couple of weeks ago. These are for audio in DAWs of course, and I have not tried them in Dorico, but since they are VSTs like any other, I imagine they can be made to work. I won’t mention any products as a quick google search will bring them up.

Nearly all of my own work in Dorico is choral in nature, and I tend not to use vocal sounds at all: because they don’t sound anything like the eventual performance, I don’t derive any benefit from using them. What’s more useful to me is using sounds with distinct timbre and definite attack, so that I can use it for aural proofing for spotting wrong notes, weak harmonies, and so on. So I tend to use some combination of wind instruments, e.g. flute for sopranos, clarinet for altos, oboe for tenors, and bassoon for basses.

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