by Roger Nichols
I knew it would happen sooner or later. I have this great reverb from TC
Electronics. It is called the M5000. The problem with the M5000 is that
it performs so many cool functions that you can't decide which ones to use.
When mixing in Pro Tools 3, I usually connect my M5000 to one of the digital
i/o ports and record the resulting reverb on another track to free up the
M5000 for another task. The bad news is that after you decide that the reverb
settings are not set exactly right, you have to re-record the reverb again.
To operate more efficiently, you need to have many M5000 reverbs.
TC Tools to the rescue. TC Electronics has announced a TDM plug-in that
gives you a world famous TC reverb and a TC chorus insert that you can use
within Pro Tools. IF you need 17 different reverbs, then you can insert
17 TC Reverbs. As long as you have the DSP power available, you can use
TC Tools as many times as you want. With external hardware reverbs, if you
need another reverb, you have to go out and buy it.
No, this is nothing like radial caratotomy. What TC has done is present
a unique graphic window for setting the parameters in the reverb and the
chorus. The way they have presented the otherwise boring information such
as "high frequency decay time" is vary easy to follow. At a glance
you can get a very good picture of what is happening inside the DSP and
how your reverb sound "looks". It does not take very much time
at all to get used to setting up new reverbs without even looking at the
numbers. "A little bit less of the light green space" becomes
the kind of conversations overheard in the control room. "That looks
good, let's try it" is heard just as often as "that sounds good".
I expected the TC Tools to sound just as good as the stand alone M5000.
The TDM system does use the same DSP as in the M5000, so it seems reasonable
that after interface problems are worked out that the sound should match
up pretty well.
In fact, it did sound the same. I was in hog heaven. I was able to free
up my M5000 for tasks like three band compression and digital EQ. I was
also able to have a separate TC reverb for each instrument. Each reverb
was set up with a quality that matched the instrument in question, instead
of one main reverb for the whole mix with individual sends from each instrument.
You can still use the "send-receive" setup if you want, but I
have never seen anyone with access to a whole bag of potato chips eat just
one.
A nice solo classical guitar sounded great with a medium large room and
70ms of pre-delay. Changing the absorption of the walls allows very fine
adjustments to the quality of the reverb and how it ties to the guitar.
Drums in a garage? How about a nice 315 car garage.
Usually you can tell about the quality of a reverb by seeing how small you
can make the room before the reverb starts sounding like fingernails on
a chalk board. No matter how small you set TC Reverb, the ambiance maintains
a rich quality that is going to be hard to beat.
The TC Chorus was equally great sounding. The results were dense and smooth
without strange side effects that you hear from even some rather expensive
stand alone chorusing devices. The available parameters along with the graphic
setting display made TC Chorus the easiest chorus to set up I have ever
seen. When recalling various chorus presets, the graphics display made it
readily apparent what the differences were between them. Seeing all of the
parameters at once made it easy to discover what sonic changes were caused
by what parameter changes.
Your first question to yourself should be "What am I going to do with
all the money I save?" Yes, you have just saved thousands of dollars
by not having to buy 17 TC M5000 reverbs. You just have to get one copy
of TC Tools for Pro Tools TDM. It could be one of the best things you ever
did with your money, except maybe sending me the 15% commission on the money
you saved. EQ has a mailbag waiting, and has promised that they will forward
all but a small handling fee.