Vienna MIR: secret tips from its creator – part 2

Welcome to a new part of my interview with Dietz Tinhof, creator of the sensational Vienna MIR Pro. If you missed the previous chapter you can find it here.

Special effects with directivity filtering

Dietz: Another little-known-of feature I’d like to talk about is the option to apply the directivity filtering to the dry signal. As long as you keep it unchecked the dry signal will always be perfectly directed according to player’s nose. As soon as you switch it on it’s like turning away the dry signal from the spot microphone. Which is pretty much what happens when you use the wrong directivity profile. Your direct signal gets blurred regardless of just the wet signal. 

Giovanni: That does make sense but, can I ask you, when would I want to use the directivity filtering on?

Dietz: For very special effects when you want an instrument playing towards the wall for certain artistic reasons or maybe just for the fun of it. And in the end it was basically implemented as it’s much easier to demonstrate how MIR reacts to the directivity features. So this is something that has to be used with caution. And in 99% of cases it doesn’t make sense to use it.

Adjust the dry/wet balance

Giovanni: Do you have specific tips that you can think of for media composers?

Dietz: The most important tip is: don’t overdo it with the wet signal. Maybe don’t settle for the wet/dry default position which can be a bit too wet for non-classical music. In fact, you could reduce the wet signal in 2 ways. 1) You set all your instruments individually to something like 25% of dry wet ratio to begin with. This is actually the proper way to do it in most cases.

Dietz: The second way is much easier, it’s the Global Dry/Wet Offset in the output panel. This is much easier because it’s available instantly for all instruments. But the downside is that you lose the possibility of fully controlling the individual dry/wet for each instrument. So if you are building a template, I recommend doing it individually, therefore. 

Auto groups

Giovanni: Awesome. Is there a way to adjust the individual dry/wet of several instruments at once?

Dietz: Yes, you can achieve that with a feature we called Auto Group. If you have switched auto group on in the preferences, all instruments will behave as a group as soon as they’re selected.

Giovanni: Oh wow

Dietz: This is also true for dry-wet ratio.

Giovanni: That’s super convenient

Dietz: Yeah, but the other way to do it (which in my opinion is even more convenient) is to keep the option switched off in the settings and to temporarily activating it by holding the option on the Mac keyboard (alt key on Windows). And as soon as I release the key all parameters can be set individually again. This is also true for bypass, for example. You can bypass all the instruments in a selection group. Or could hide them, so they don’t clutter the screen real estate. Of course it’s also true for width, or for rotations and stuff like that. This is a very powerful tool to manage your template.

Giovanni: That’s amazing. That’s so useful. That’s gonna change my life.

Dietz: [laughs]

Dietz: In Vienna Ensemble pro you can even save those selection groups so you can easily group all string instruments, all woodwinds etcetera.

Blending libraries

Giovanni: After a few months of using MIR I think it enables composers to use virtual instruments from many different brands while keeping a homogeneous sound throughout. Would you agree?

Dietz: To a certain extent. But I wouldn’t go as far as trying to undo the room impression you get from other libraries, especially when they’re recorded wet. As soon as we talk about recordings made in different studios with a certain degree of wetness, it is hard to blend them together. So to achieve the best results use the driest microphones available in the library, ideally the close mics.

Reverb time trick

Dietz: A cool trick that many forget about is to load a room pack with a huge reverb, like a church, and bring down the reverberation time slider a lot. A huge orchestral stage will sound more like a scoring stage when you bring down the reverb time from maybe 1.7 to 0.9 seconds.

Giovanni: So cool that you show the actual pictures of the spaces in the interface, I love that.

Dietz: [laughs] These are real rooms after all. We’ve been there for hours and hours, days actually [laughs].

Giovanni: I’ll definitely try that trick with my room pack to hear how it sounds!

Audio examples

Dietz: Oh by the way, I have… I compiled a small Spotify playlist for you, with music that I mixed using MIR during the last six or seven years. It’s very diverse stuff. From rock and pop to small acoustic stuff, jazz- lots of jazz actually and a few scores I mixed.

Giovanni: Awesome

Best room pack for media composers

Giovanni: I would like to ask you about the room packs. I have the Teledex room pack. I love it. I use almost exclusively the Teldex room actually of that room pack. Is there one of the room packs with more–

Dietz: studios and scoring stages, yeah. If you love Teldex, you should be very very excited to hear Synchron stage. I think Synchron stage is Teldex and then some. 

Giovanni: Oh wow.

Dietz: It’s much clearer and has more … how to say … it has some kind of preciseness especially in the bass that I hardly know from any other place on this planet. It’s really really beautiful!

Giovanni: Oh my god you are making me wish I had done more homework when I bought my room pack. Would you say it is the go-to room pack for media composers?

Dietz: It’s hard to say… It’s like saying which instrument do you like most. They have all different voices that I use for different tasks. Actually I am pretty proud of all of them, because there are even some very unique rooms which no longer exist. One of the studios we recorded back then is now a garage. It’s a real pity. Stuff like that is unique. And that’s why I have a hard time to point out, to single out one of them. But I think Synchron stage is a must have. Because the room is so great in reality, and our virtual version of it is so elaborate. 

MIR and synths

Giovanni: Awesome. Let’s talk about synths. So of course real instruments really shine with MIR. How about synths. Can you use MIR in creative ways with synths?

Dietz: If we are talking about pads, not so much. Pads are often supposed to be bigger than life and they don’t have real dimension. They just fill everything all around you. So maybe this is not something I would use a lot with MIR. What I do use all the time is percussive instruments, basses, leads, stuff that has rhythmic features.

Giovanni: that’s very useful to know. 

Room EQ

Dietz: The single most important error people commonly make is that they don’t adjust the Room EQ. In the Output Panel there is an EQ which is only affecting the wet part of MIR. You can have 32 different settings of your Room EQ for a chosen Venue. So you can have an individual Room EQ for a bass drum and for a vocal, for example. Once you create a preset you can assign it to as many signals as you want. And the more signals you send into MIR, the more it’s important to get rid of a little bit of low end.

Giovanni: And by just working on the wet signal you’re not changing the main signal, right?

Dietz: No no, the main signal should sound like it was intended sound. Really, this is just about the room. It’s not a mis-named master EQ! 

Giovanni: also if you have a template and program those in once, then you have them ready for you every time. So i’ll definitely do it for my next template!

Check the next part for tips on mix width and to find out which items on my MIR wish-list are likely to see the light in the future!