Two seperate questions

1. I know EKT knows a lot about reverb, what's the best reverb plugin I can get (needs to work with Renoise) - I don't mind paying if it's fucking decent!

2. I've messed about with some refill's in Reason and they are usually real samples that you can manipulate by syncing them with other things or whatever - I really want to know what is the best thing to use for composing fake classical music, preferably something that uses real samples or just truely awesome emulation (for example, that Reason piano refill sounds great).

Cheers

i've been using Waves Renaissance Reverb, but it's just a nice sounding reverb, not realistic.

the convolution reverbs are probably more realistic and have impulse files taken from various auditoriums and opera houses and stuff. waves IR series is that sort, haven't used.

i'm assuming you would want a realistic modeled sort of reverb, if you were planning on using it to emulate classical recordings.

i don't know what to recommend for your second question

there are some dvd-sized symphonic sample libraries out there i think...

I mostly use a reverb called R66 - can't remember who makes it. It's pretty sweet I find.

I would sugest Waves IR for realistic reverb (provided you have good impulse files).

For Orchestral emulation, you can go from cheapo (Garritan Personal Orchestra) to "holy fucking shit" expensive (Vienna Symphony, I think for the full balls out orchestra set you're looking at like $10,000).

Kcinsu has some good stuff to say on that subject as he had to work with both for school.

yeah horses for courses. different reverbs for different jobs etc. I use renaissance as well and its a good workhorse verb.

the main verb i use these days is a lexicon hardware one, you can get there lower end units very cheap these days, i use an mpx 100 which i picked up for £50 and it sounds great, getting on for as good as there high en stuff for most applications!

for classical emulation, the eastwest orchestra stuff is great, I use the cheap one (silver) and I was blown away for the price, the costly stuff of theirs is great, really great. I have also got edirol orchestral which is ok ish, but very synthetic sounding.

reverb: altiverb is top of the line convolution reverb. no idea if it works with renoise though. I personally use space designer (as it is built in to logic pro) for convolution, and wave arts masterverb for classic PCM reverb stuff.

classical emulation: its a hard one. you can go nuts like someone said before, and spend 10,000 dollars... or, you can find budget stuff. different libraries have different strengths and weaknesses. there was an article in electronic musician this past year, talking about getting decent results on a budget... and the key is to mix and match. Ive personally worked with the VSL opus libraries (about $1000 total) and it was very nice. It doesnt do any crazy stuff, but for standard orchestral stuff, it did pretty well. Right now I am just using the free VSL library that comes with Kontakt 2, as it suits my needs for sketches, and I am not looking to do actual emulation work.

The 2 heavy hitters are VSL and East West, it seems.

Cheers for the responces, I'll think I'll try a bit of all those different reverb plugins and see what I like the most. As for the classical side I think I'll look into it a bit more but all the names of software here is damn helpful anyway - I'm kind of interested in mashing up Classical with other genres at the moment, not that it's not been done 100x before.

altiverb > *

it's fucking disgusting how good it is.