Valhalla Shimmer — [ Ссылка ]
How's it going, producer? Thales here and today I want to talk about one of my favorite plugins, Valhalla Shimmer and show you a few different ways to get creative with this kind of effect, which is like a pitch shifting modulated reverb with delay features. I use it to create really lush soundscapes.
And it's so easy to use and only costs $50, so totally worth it. The initial preset already sounds fantastic.
Smooth, right? But there's a couple tweaks we can do to get really creative with this.
Let's start by understanding the controls. The first one is pretty simple, a mix knob, which controls how much effect is going to be added to the dry signal.
This is my dry piano sound:
And this is 100% valhalla shimmer:
You can make all kinds of pads with this, and even automate this parameter for tension buildups and preparing for a transition in your song. But I'll leave it at 50% for now so we can take a look at the other controls.
It has 4 reverb modes: Mono, Small Stereo, Medium Stereo and Big Stereo. When you change this setting, you're picking different kinds of decay, from a small room decay to a very large space.
We'll talk about the Shift knob later. Even though it's the most important feature, it will make more sense once you understand the other controls.
To my ears, the feedback knob acts like a delay control. I feel like it feeds the sounds back into the reverb over and over again, depending on how high you set this up. If you leave it at 0, it simply works as a reverb. But once you start adding feedback, it gets more and more chaotic.
To the point where it's out of control:
Depending on what kind of music you're making, you can go crazy here, but for my style, I usually keep this under 50%.
Imagine that the diffusion knob is like the attack time before the reverb is added to the signal, but backwards. So it comes at almost 90% by default, and that's immediate reflections.
But as you go lower, like 60%, it almost sounds like a reverse reverb effect, which is a huge time saver because electronic music producers use that all the time.
And if you go even lower, close to 0%, it sounds like a delay instead of a reverb. Or a delay with a little bit of reverb.
The size knob allows you to fine tune the size of the room:
I feel like you can make anything sound gorgeous at 0%.
Of course what makes this plugin so special are the larger sizes for massive cinematic effects.
The next knobs, low cut and high cut, mean exactly what you're thinking. You can remove unwanted frequencies from the wet signal. So in this case, we're cutting frequencies below 860 Hertz and above 12 kilohertz.
The modulation rate and depth knobs are where things get really interesting. We can emphasize the modulation that this plugin is applying to the signal.
It's more noticeable on a small size. So we'll keep the Size knob at 0 for now, so it's easier for us to hear the difference. The mod rate knob affects the speed of the chorus effect.
And the mod depth knob affects the detuning of the chorus effect. It adds a lot of movement to the reflections.
I really like it at around 30%. Sounds fantastic. But the higher you go, the more expressive it gets. In my experience, if you want to get a good sound with a lot of chorus depth, it works best with a slow rate and a larger size.
But there are no rules here, I encourage you to experiment with everything, you'd be surprised with the crazy sounds you can make.
Now, it's time we talk about the Shift knob. This is where the magic actually happens. First of all, it only affects your sound if the Feedback knob is higher than zero.
And what it does is, it changes the pitch of the reflections. So you can come up with very interesting textures by using it an octave down or up:
This is the classic shimmer effect, especially if you use longer feedback. But you can also come up with horror movie textures by shifting just one semitone, or just a couple, and stacking dissonances.
And you can even have a slow detune effect as the decay happens by setting it real close to zero. This sounds really cool with a higher feedback.
You can make this effect sound darker by changing the color mode switch.
It sounds more controlled, and it resembles more of a large space where the bright frequencies don't travel much.
And the pitch mode is the last control. It affects how the plugin responds to the pitch values you set with the pitch knob.
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So I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, I'll make sure to add a link to their website in the description below so you can try it for youself, and maybe I'll get to listen to the crazy sounds you design with the Valhalla Shimmer.
I'm Thales, thanks for hanging out. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and like this video if you learned something today or you're interested in pop music production.
#ThalesMatos #MusicProducer #PopMusic
