Reverb is an essential and ubiquitous effect. It provides a sense of depth and distance that allows us to stage our music in realistic – or surrealistic – acoustic spaces. It can bring shape, movement and life to a part. And yes, we do rather like it. But doesn’t it get a little… boring?
Historically, reverbs have fallen into two categories: convolution and algorithmic. The former can sound great, but the limited ability to shape and hone the reverb (short of loading a different impulse) is restrictive. Plus, any reverb generated from an impulse will sound fairly similar to any other reverb generated from the same impulse. It’s like ‘90s ROMplers but for reverb, and it’s just as boring.
Algorithmic ‘verbs can also sound great, but too many modern examples are simply emulations, rehashes of the same old “classic” algos developed by EMT and Lexicon more than 40 years ago.
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Surely the untrammelled possibilities afforded by modern computing can be harnessed to do something new and interesting with this decades-old effect? Surely there’re some plugin designers out there with a sufficiently vivid imagination to come up with something fresh and exciting?
Of course there are! Below, we’ve gathered together seven of the weirdest ‘verbs we could find to discover which unconventional approach to simulated reverberation would produce the most inspiring results. For each plugin, we’ve included five audio examples, with both dry and wet examples to demonstrate the effect.
1. AberrantDSP Lair
Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux | Price: $24 | Find out more
Lurking deep inside Lair you’ll find an algorithmic reverb generator, but things get weird from the get-go. Rather than run-of-the-mill algorithms for rooms and halls and what-have-you, we have a choice of “Devices”: Artifact, Mirror and Rift, which are (very) loosely based on spring, plate and hall/cavern algorithms, albeit warped and twisted in intriguing ways.
In addition (and announced just as we were about to publish!), the new Lair 1.5 update gains Cascade and The Swarm devices, these being more echo- or delay-like in their effect although, again, these are fascinatingly contorted compared to conventional algorithms. Also new in v1.5 is the ability to combine in parallel any two devices, with each having its own independent mix level and stereo spread.
Nevertheless, many of these controls also stretch their tendrils into unexpected areas of the chosen Device, eliciting quirky and unexpected responses that catch the attention and tickle the ear. Moreover, these parameters can have a very different impact depending on the currently chosen Device; taking the oddness a step further are a pair of modulators that insinuate their way into various areas of the plugin to add their own peculiar slant on proceedings.
Lair can be tamed to deliver conventional reverbs, but is at its best when its peculiarities are embraced. One doesn’t so much hone in on a reverb sound as fiddle around listening for interesting responses, an approach that sits perfectly with the more experimental side of music-making that is Lair’s natural domain.
As its name suggests, then, Lair is a deep, dark and brooding reverb plugin. Its gothic design, unconventional labelling, and peculiar under-the-hood interactions result in characterful and tonally complex reverbs that are endlessly fascinating, and the newfound ability to combine Devices – in particular, combining delay- and reverb-style effects – vastly extends the plugin’s already impressive peculiarities.
2. ADPTR Utopia
Formats: VST3, VST2, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $150 | Find out more
“We weren’t going to make just another reverb, that would be boring”, says ADPTR Audio’s Marc Adamo – great minds think alike, I guess! Adamo’s search for a non-boring ‘verb led him to Signalsmith Audio’s Geraint Luff and an intriguing prototype for a reverb algorithm that he’d developed.
Rather than generating the same-old wash of delay lines, or harnessing convolution processing, Luff’s algorithm utilises a spectral processing engine to re-synthesize audio into “spatial textures”. So ADPTR and Signalsmith teamed up and, after a couple of years of R&D, came up with Utopia.
Utopia does an excellent line in conventional hall and room ‘verbs, its novel approach creating results that sound simultaneously familiar yet different to what you’ve heard before: richer, silkier, more sumptuous and, as a result, stunningly realistic. Where Utopia truly excels, though, is in the more colourful and elaborate ends of reverb: shimmering modulated dreamscapes, dancing reflections, otherworldly resonances, twisted echoing tunnels and so much more.
Despite this sonic complexity, Utopia’s basics are easy to work with, and the plugin features many familiar controls: pre-delay, decay, early-reflection level and so-on. There are some additional, more esoteric parameters on offer, and these can take a bit more effort to get to grips with. But experimenting with the large library of excellent presets, and keeping an eye on the tips shown at the bottom of the window whenever you hover over a control, helps make things clearer.
Rarely has a reverb plugin been as aptly named as Utopia! No matter the source (leads, pads, vocals, bass… whatever!) the results are sumptuous, rich and satisfying. Or weird and unhinged, if that’s your preference. Even its common-or-garden reverbs have a classiness that’s all their own.
3. Arturia REV Ocean
Formats: VST3, VST2, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $49 | Find out more
One tried-and-tested way of making reverb more interesting is to chain it with other effects and processors – delays, dynamics, pitch-shifters, choruses, etc. Throw in some modulation and ingenious routing and your reverbs can become bold sonic features rather than timid afterthoughts. The downside is that creating, configuring and fine-tuning such processing chains can be immensely fiddly.
Sailing to the rescue is Arturia’s REV Ocean. Although it’s an algorithmic reverb, the plugin doesn’t present a choice of reverb types, nor does it overwhelm with a plethora of settings for shaping the reverb. Rather, it wraps all of these finer details into a succinct and accessible interface that makes light work of dialling in basic reverbs of any flavour.
Where REV Ocean steps outside the norm is with its three so-called Macro Modes, these being hidden processing chains that enhance, colour and animate the reverb (accompanied by suitably aquatic animations in the plugin’s visualisation). Abyss adds layers of reverse reverbs and octave shifts; Foam fills the reverb tail with expanding resonant reflections; and Tide injects semi-random phaser-like filter sweeps into the ‘verb. A simple slider controls the strength of the chosen Macro Mode’s effect, but the conventional reverb parameters also impact on the character of the Macro Mode modulations.
The deceptively simple user interface makes it ridiculously easy to create complex and evolving reverbs, and the plugin itself is sufficiently versatile to complement a wide range of sources and situations, happily swinging from conventional acoustic space simulations through to shifting and animated reverbs.
4. BLEASS Spectral Reverb
Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $39 | Find out more
Like all spectral effects, BLEASS Spectral Reverb works in the frequency domain, converting incoming audio to spectral data before processing it, but it doesn’t employ some novel or elaborate reverb generation technique: its spectral billing refers chiefly to the way each reverb parameter can be applied differently across the frequency spectrum.
The reverb generator itself is straightforward, even simple, with a pair of input filters for basic colouring and just three actual reverb generation parameters: attack, decay and width. This basic recipe allows the plugin to do a good line in conventional reverb sounds, from tight, intimate rooms to wide, echo-laden caverns.
The controls for these reverb parameters are accompanied by BLEASS’ unique Spectral Map controls, which determine how the accompanying parameter’s effect will be distributed across the spectrum. Clicking-and-dragging (or tapping-and-dragging if using the AUv3 version in iOS) in a Spectral Map creates peaks, troughs, or ascending and descending slopes across the vertical bars drawn within the map.
The resulting height of each bar represents the strength with which the accompanying parameter is applied at the frequency represented by each bar in the Map. The bars aren’t individually editable, and are intended as a handy visualisation rather than a scientifically accurate representation of the spectrum. This may sound a bit confusing, but it’s actually super intuitive to use. For example, creating an increasing left-to-right slope in the Decay time’s Spectral Map will cause higher frequencies to have longer decay times than lower ones.
Adding to the core reverb generation are four slots into which any of six different processors can be placed, all designed to do interesting things within the frequency domain, and many of which are rather novel. Some, such as Harmony Follow and Spectral Enhancer, modify the entire signal.
Others, such as Spectral Gate and Pitch Shifter, incorporate their own Spectral Maps that allow their effect to be varied depending on frequency. For example, the Pitch Shifter’s Spectral Map varies the amount of pitch-shifting that’s applied at different frequencies… which can sound kinda mad!
A large realtime spectrogram helps make sense of what the plugin’s doing, and dragging within this visualisation provides another tactile way to mess with the reverb’s spectrum. As a nice final flourish, the plugin’s spectral processing settings are always on-hand, so you can crank them up for pristine reverbs, or drag them down for some nice, dirty, lo-fi fun.
Blessed with BLEASS’ trademark tactility and immediacy, Spectral Reverb’s surface simplicity hides an endlessly fascinating reverb. The additional processors massively expand the scope for creating original and unique reverb effects.
5. Eventide Temperance Pro
Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $199 | Find out more
Additive synthesis works on the principle that any sound can be deconstructed into a set of simple sine wave “partials”, and be accurately recreated by reproducing those partials. We mention this because additive synthesis is a close analogue to the novel Tempered Ambiance technology found in Temperance Pro and its little brother, Temperance Lite.
Tempered Ambiance constructs reverberations by combining many simple single-frequency resonances, or “modes of vibration”. This allows reverbs to be defined in terms of frequency resonances instead of delay and decay times; put another way, Temperance Pro operates in the frequency domain rather than the time domain.
Perhaps the biggest practical upshot of this approach is that it allows the reverb to be tuned, or “tempered” (hence the name!). Taking advantage of this, Temperance Pro offers three different Note Selection modes: manual, sequence and MIDI. Manual allows you to define a fixed set of resonant notes; sequence allows an up-to 64 bar sequence of notes to be defined; MIDI uses incoming MIDI messages to select resonant frequencies.
The strength of the tuning impact – or Temper – is adjustable from -100% to 100%. Positive Tempers enhance resonances around the currently selected note(s) while reducing other resonances; negative values reduce resonances around the current note(s) and increase other resonances; no tempering is applied when Temper is “0”. A Note Width parameter determines the bandwidth of frequencies that will be affected by the Tempering.
This is all very intriguing, and allows the plugin to produce various resonance-type effects alongside its main line in reverbs, giving it a broad range of creative uses. Sound quality is pristine, as you would expect from Eventide, and everything is beautifully presented (which is also as you’d expect). And of course the idea of a playable reverb is an enticing one, so it’s all the more disappointing that Temperance Pro isn’t as interesting as it should be.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s a good reverb processor – excellent, in fact – and its Tempered Ambiance technology does bring with it some useful abilities, most notably reducing frequency masking between a reverb and its source, and creating harmonised ringing within a reverb. It’s just that the originality of the results doesn’t quite match the novelty of the reverb technology that produced them.
In summary, then, Temperance Pro is a clean, detailed, high-quality reverb processor but, just as with its spiritual forebear, additive synthesis, the theoretical promise of its Tempered Ambiance technology doesn’t quite carry over into real-world results.
6. Lese Hikari
Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $55 | Find out more
Lese Hikari’s reverb generator is a fairly standard affair, emulating ‘90s and ‘00s digital hardware reverb units, but what makes it interesting are the number of ways in which stochastic randomness can be introduced into proceedings (“stochastic” meaning the random generation is probabilistic rather than purely random).
The centre of the plugin window is occupied by a topographical map that can be dragged around manually, or an Autopilot can be engaged to cause the map to move by itself. Either way, the currently visible topography is used to seed the plugin’s random generators and, additionally, X and Y movement of the map can be assigned to any other reverb control as a modulation source.
The map features so-called Anomalies, randomly generated points where the processing changes, sometimes bringing in extra effects not heard elsewhere, and sometimes doing nothing at all. The closer the map comes to an Anomaly, the more noticeable the sonic impact should become. Arrows at the edge of the map point towards these Anomalies, and as you drag closer to them, the map changes colour to indicate their proximity.
The plugin provides a choice of different early reflection patterns, all the better for creating unique and off-the-wall effects. There are nine patterns in total, although these tend towards just three or four sets of closely related (and therefore largely indistinguishable) patterns. There’s also a gate that can be triggered manually or via a sequence/pattern, and damping to shape the reverb time across the frequency spectrum.
Finally there’s an Illusion parameter controlling a granular processor that stores audio grains from the input signal, reverses them, and then plays them into the reverb. This doesn’t deliver much in the way of desirable results, the most obvious outcome being that it can, for some inexplicable reason, choke off the reverb altogether.
Overall, then, Lese Hikari’s random colourations and adjustments ensure its sound departs decisively from the old-school Lexicon/EMT algorithms, and give it real potential as a creative and unconventional reverb. Sadly it doesn’t fully live up to that potential, the stochastic randomness at its heart tending to translate to relatively subtle changes in sonic outcome.
7. Soundtoys SpaceBlender
If you really want unconventional reverb, you’d be best placed to start with an unconventional reverb generation engine, and that’s exactly what SpaceBlender does with its implementation of a novel synthesis technique known as Swarm Synthesis.
Central to the plugin window is a so-called texture, essentially a waveform whose complexity can be varied from a simple pattern of individual transients through to a complex noise-like wave. The length of time represented by the wave can be varied from 100 milliseconds to one minute, and its dynamics – how its volume changes over time – are shaped by dragging a pulsing node across the waveform.
Incoming sounds pass through the texture (and are animated passing through it), interacting with it to generate shifting reverbs that follow the texture’s complex transient and dynamic patterns. When the sound reaches the end of the texture, it stops generating reverb. A simple set of dials allow the length and tone of the reverb to be adjusted, and for a touch of chorus-like modulation to be added.
From these basic ingredients comes a lavish banquet of rich, luscious, and wholly unnatural reverbs that truly tickle the ears, and that stand in contrast to the chunky and slightly simplistic look of the plugin itself. All manner of reverb types can be generated too, from sparse, almost delay-like echoes through to dense, complex washes that can stretch for up to a minute. The plugin’s speciality, though, is reverb pulses and gated reverbs, easily created by dragging the time and texture knobs to create the desired shape and length.
Overall, SpaceBlender is without doubt the most immediate and easy-to-use plugin in this roundup, so it’s impressive that its reverb sounds are also amongst the most pleasing too. It’s not really suitable for creating realistic ambiences and acoustic spaces, but if you want big, washy tails, easy density control, or timed reverb pulses and gates, SpaceBlender is the solution you’ve been looking for.
Working through this varied collection of plugins has restored our faith in the originality and inventiveness of reverb designers. All of them explore new avenues for creating ambiences and (sur)real acoustic spaces, and all try their best to come at things from a new angle, rather than just reinventing an already overly-reinvented wheel.
For this reason alone, each and every one of these reverbs is a sparkling gem (or perhaps, in Lair’s case, a seething monster), and far more worthy of your attention than the same-old common-or-garden convolution and algorithmic options that likely fill your plugin folder.
Of course, those conventional ‘verbs have their place, but when you need something richer, denser, wilder, more complex or more attention-grabbing, any one of these plugins would serve you well.
