TG SPACES 1.0
An accessible convolution reverb. 190 spaces, none of them recorded.

TG Studios - https://tgstudios.app


WHAT IT IS

Drop it on a track, pick a space, and your sound is in that space. A bedroom,
a cathedral, an open field, a drive-through speaker. Then move around inside it:
walk to the back of the hall, make the room bigger, turn your head.

Most reverbs of this kind ship recordings of real rooms. This one ships a
room-acoustics model and builds each response as you ask for it. That is why
"room size" makes a bigger room instead of stretching a recording, and why
walking away from the source changes the pre-delay, the balance of direct to
reflected sound, the high-frequency loss through the air and the width of the
stereo image all at once - because those are all consequences of standing
somewhere else, not separate knobs.

It also means every space in here is original work, built from physical
first principles. Nothing is sampled, licensed or borrowed from anyone.


WHAT IS NEW IN 1.0

The room controls glide. Distance and Listener angle no longer step under
automation: the positions either side of where you are standing get built in
advance and crossfaded, and crossfading two convolutions is the same thing as
convolving with the response in between - so a fast sweep moves smoothly. That
was the one stated reason the last release was called 0.9.

Small rooms sound small. Below a certain frequency a small room rings at
pitches set by its own dimensions. That is modelled now, so a bedroom, a car
interior and a cardboard box each have their own character rather than sharing
a short generic decay.

Big rooms decay on more than one slope. A cathedral's nave and its side aisles
empty at different rates, so the tail bends partway down instead of falling in
a straight line.

Speakers distort. The megaphone, the PA and the small radios are real device
models now. They compress and break up when driven hard and clean up when they
are not. Before, they were filters.

78 new spaces, and every original one rebuilt as a specific place rather than
a set of numbers.

Your old sessions still work. A project saved with 0.9 opens and sounds as it
did - every original space kept its place in the list, and a session saved
before 1.0 loads on the old engine automatically. A Model version control
switches between the two if you want an old sound in a new project.


THE PART THAT MATTERS IF YOU CANNOT SEE

Every control is a named parameter that speaks its value in words, not numbers.
In Reaper with OSARA, press P on the track and arrow through them:

    Space           Rooms: Bedroom
    Room info       4.0 by 3.6 by 2.5 metres, 0.33 second decay
    Distance        12.4 m, inside the critical distance
    Listener angle  facing the source
    Mix             wet only, impulse response alone

Room info reads you the dimensions of the space you are in and how long it
rings, without you having to play anything.

Distance reports real metres for the room you are actually in. Listener angle
says "facing the source" and "90 degrees left" rather than a number you have to
translate. Low cut says "off" rather than "20".

Category and Space in category let you move through the library a group at a
time instead of arrowing past everything.

All 190 spaces are also exposed as presets, so they appear in Reaper's FX
preset dropdown at the top of the plugin window and can be stepped through
from there.

There is no custom plugin window, and that is deliberate. A drawn interface
would look better and work worse.


INSTALLING

Windows, 64-bit.

1. Copy the folder "TG Spaces.vst3" into either of these:

       C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
       %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Common\VST3\

   The second one needs no administrator password. Reaper reads both.

2. In Reaper: Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, VST, then Re-scan.

3. It appears as "TG Spaces".

To uninstall, delete that folder. Nothing is written anywhere else, there is no
installer, no registry entries and no background service.


DAW SUPPORT

Tested in Reaper on Windows. That is the honest scope of what has been verified
for this build.

It is a standard VST3, so it should load in any VST3 host on 64-bit Windows -
Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig, Cakewalk,
Mixcraft, Waveform, Ardour. It has not been tested in those, and the
accessibility depends heavily on the host: the plugin exposes named, readable
parameters, but whether your screen reader reads them is down to the DAW. Reaper
with OSARA is where that works properly today.

macOS is a separate download from https://tgstudios.app - a VST3 for Reaper and
an Audio Unit for Logic Pro, GarageBand and MainStage, both universal.

Pro Tools would need AAX, which is further off.


THE CONTROLS

There are 33. The first twelve are the ones you will use most, and they are in
the same order and by the same names as in 0.9.

Space           190 rooms, grouped by category.
Distance        Walks you from right up against the source to the far end.
Room size       Rebuilds the room larger or smaller.
Decay           Shortens or lengthens the tail without changing the room.
                Also the CPU control - halving the decay halves the cost.
Listener angle  Turns you. Zero means facing the source.
Listening mode  Speakers, or Binaural headphones with a modelled head.
Mix             Dry to wet.
Pre-delay       Up to 250 ms before the room responds.
Width           Stereo width of the reverb. Zero is mono-safe.
Low cut         Cleans up the bottom of the reverb.
High cut        Takes the top off, for older or darker spaces.
Output          Level.

After those: Model version, then the navigation controls (Category, Space in
category, Room info), the wet-path controls (Diffusion, Tail damping, Early
late balance), the geometry (Listener height, Source elevation, Source
directivity, Head size), and the performance controls (Character, Ducking and
its threshold and release, Tail modulation and its rate, Crossfeed, Freeze,
Pre-delay sync, Random space).

Every one of them is documented in the manual on the website.


AUTOMATION

Smooth and sample-accurate: Mix, Pre-delay, Width, Low cut, High cut, Output.

Smooth under automation: Distance and Listener angle. Both rebuild the room,
but the positions on either side of where you are get built in advance, so a
sweep has somewhere to go and moves without stepping. This is what changed in
1.0.

Space, Room size and Decay also rebuild the room, and those are not built ahead
of time - a fast move can still be heard as a change rather than a glide. The
crossfade follows how alike the two rooms are, so moving between similar rooms
is close to seamless and moving between very different ones is not.

To move a sound across a room, automate Distance directly. In 0.9 that was the
thing you could not do.


CPU AND MEMORY

Around 5 percent of one core for a typical room. Long spaces cost more, because
a twelve-second cathedral is twelve seconds of convolution - use the Decay
control to trade tail length against CPU.

Responses are cached as you use them, so repeated playback of the same
automation is cheaper the second time. The cache is capped and clears itself.


KNOWN ROUGH EDGES

A few of the largest spaces - the airport terminal and the stone church in
particular - ring longer than their real-world counterparts do. They are being
tuned against measured figures for real buildings, and that work is not
finished.

Loudness is not matched across the library, so moving between a small room and
a cathedral needs a level trim.


LICENCE

Free to use, for any purpose, including commercial work. Music, records, film,
podcasts, games - whatever you make with it is yours, with no attribution
required and no royalties.

Please do not redistribute, resell, or repackage the plugin itself. Send people
to https://tgstudios.app instead, so they get updates and so I can tell how many
people are using it.

No warranty. It has been tested carefully, but you should not put a plugin you
have not tried yourself on a session you cannot afford to lose.


THANKS

Matthew Whitaker - contributor, and the source of a good many of the ideas that
ended up in this thing during development.

    https://matthewwhitaker.net


FEEDBACK

Bug reports, especially from screen reader users, are genuinely wanted - this
only gets better if people tell me where it falls down.

    hello@tgstudios.app
    https://tgstudios.app


Tony Gebhard
TG Studios
