Thanks for the reply!! So I may be ok with the Valhalla reverb stuff after all. I keep hearing great things about their reverb. I’ll do a little more digging around to double check. And I will definitely grab some of the neural products too since they don’t require external dsp. I get tired of guitar rig, and need some new tools! Thanks again !

Valhalla stuff (or at least all of it that I'm familiar with) is 100% native--the only processor it needs is the one in your computer. You can absolutely use it with a Focusrite Clarett (and I have).

"Valhalla DSP" = the name of my company since around 2007 or so, when we incorporated. For the first few years, Valhalla was focused on consulting gigs, programming digital signal processing for clients. Once our first commercial plugin went live in October 2010 (ValhallaShimmer) it became very clear that our focus would be on making plugins, versus consulting. But the official company name, and the URL, still has the DSP in there.

We don't require hardware DSP to run our plugins. Honestly, none of our plugins can take advantage of any hardware DSP. They all run natively on Intel/AMD/ARM processors (Intel & AMD for Windows, Intel & ARM Apple Silicon for Mac).

I use a Focusrite Clarett 8 and various Scarletts in my office, BTW.

Geez . . . don't you guys know ANYthing? Valhalla DSP stands for "Valhalla = Doggone Sweet Plugins". Get a grip!

Sean, I didn't know Shimmer was your first. It's certainly unique and one I grab for awesome fx that other verbs can't do.

Thanks so much for responding personally. I didn’t receive a response on Instagram, so I’m glad you took the time to give me the go on here ! I will be buying a couple of your plugins as soon as I arrive to my studio in the morning, now that I know I’m good! I look forward to hearing the results!

The original company name idea was Valhalla Sound. Turns out there was an established company with that name, that wanted to know if we were gonna use the URL we had. So we changed our name in 2006 or so. It's not like there was anything under the Valhalla name on our end back then - it was more of an idea from 2002 to 2008 or so, when I started work on the Valhalla plugins.

Thanks! Eos from Audio Damage got a "Valhalla DSP" credit in summer 2009, but the first Valhalla DSP plugin was FreqEcho in March 2010. Shimmer was the first Valhalla plugin that we sold.

Side-track: Still a marvelous delay and free at that.

Try the new AA Silver for a treat

Plates & springs: various Nebula - VERY realistic
Spaces for classical music, choirs: IRs of Sony DRS777 from Henry Olonga
Rooms: IK Sunset, Liquidsonics Rooms, room preset in Relab 480, Nebula rooms, U-He Protoverb
Ambience: Liquidsonics Illusion
naughty 80‘s: RMX townhouse IRs
Blade runner sauce: UAD 224
Pristine, clear, resolved: TC Poco VSS3
Effects, freeze: Sonsig
EMT250 for voice: TC PoCo DVR

@ Rumi said something like the free U-He Protoverb has some similarities. I never had a Quantec, so can’t compare. Waiting for Relab to finish their Quantec plugin.

I'm always surprised Convology XT isn't mentioned more...it's free and demos sound amazing, what's missing?

..

Self-quoting feels a bit weird, but it's perfectly healthy I've been told so here we go

As a follow up, the preset bank for Supermassive will not be included in the Supermassive installer, Sean from ValhallaDSP explained us why that's not doable and we understand completely. So, we will do our best to release them on our website as soon as possible. There are some things we have to take care of and our schedule is a bit full, but it shouldn't take weeks of course.

In the meantime, please feel free to check out some audio demo's that we made with some of the presets here:
https://soundcloud.com/solidtrax/set...e-preset-demos

I just woke up and this day is going to be alright!

Love those Ice Castles!!

Apart from those sweet little ValhallaDSP verbs and some particular ones like AudioDamage Eos2 (also partly by Sean Costello) and SoundToys LittlePlate plus a few Eventides, my main reverb stalwarts have become:
- EastWest Spaces 2 for convolution (instrument specific!)
- FabFilter Pro-R for algorithmic (and that GUI!)
- Zynaptiq Adaptiverb (sheer reverb magic!)

I've been a HUGE fan of the various tools from Blue Cat Audio lately. They are not strictly reverbs, but they're great audio utilities that can make reverbs and delays sound great without drowning your dry signal.

* I'm using Late Replies by setting the sync to the song's BPM and base delay to 0.5 beats. Next, I add a couple of replies at 1/8th and 3/8th of the 0.5 beat. For each of those replies, I'm adding in my usual reverbs, compressors, delays, etc and I usually go overboard in terms of subtlety. For example, sometimes I will add a distortion or bitcrusher at the end of a reply chain. The trick with this plugin is to enable the post signal ducker, and I dial things back by around 35-50% or sometimes higher. This results in some of the thickest / luscious vocals I've been able to achieve, without being too much. See attached photo below.

* I may end up using their MB-7 to add a reverb to a selective band. Or a compressor on a different band.

Thanks guys!

It's live! 139 presets for Supermassive that focus heavily on reverb. And you can get it for free, please check out all the information here:

https://www.solidtrax.nl/sound-design/earth-stars

We hope you enjoy the presets as much as we enjoyed making them.

That new Kilohearts Convolver is not bad either.

Wow!! Thanks!!!

Holy fun, really nice; one of those presets I wont' mention for a while () perfectly takes the listener to an earlier time, the way it maybe dopplers in and out. I was listening to some old Jim Croce and wow; that took me to another place and another time.
I'll be honest, I went with a discount and now have $9 to last two weeks. It's going to be a great-sounding two weeks though

Thanks so much Solidtrax's for the boost and advantage

So I’m switching things up. I’m selling Sonsig, Blackhole, and MTurboReverb. And quite possibly Nimbus and R4.

Briefly on the Melda, it’s simple: I have MXXX now, and it comes with every melda plugin in it, so may as well at least temporarily recoup some of the cost for what is looking to be a pretty revolutionary black friday sale for me. Extremely exciting times, as my computer is the primary, secondary and tertiary reason I don’t write music as much as I want, and I hate it, and I can finally afford a machine that can handle what I need it to handle.

On the Sonsig:
- I just bought HD Cart, and it is freaky good. It’s doing some of what I liked for the modulated-or-clean tails, but has more controls where it matters for me without coming close to being overbearing, and the sound is so good. I also was not expecting the small spaces to sound so incredibly good. I love Sonsig, but... I’ve not been using it aside from giant tails, which...
- Surprisingly, VSR S24 is doing incredibly. Am just getting into it now, buying it tonight from someone. Holy ****. The rooms. The halls. It’s ****ing out of this world good sounding to my ears. A few minutes of testing this, and Nimbus and R4 were essentially retired. I may keep them both around for the tails which are useful and pretty, still, but between VSR and quite possibly Cinematic Rooms, their early reflections modules will have far less use for small spaces. Perhaps medium spaces. As far as the Sonsig goes, the modulation available in VSR S24 more than satisfies, and combined with the ERs this is blowing Sonsig out of the water for my uses. Goodbye, beautiful purple inferface.

For Blackhole, well, I just don’t use it, and where I do, either Supermassive or VSR or any dialed-up-to-9001 reverb tends to sound better to me. The mod strip is useful, but that’s why I made an Image-Line Patcher preset that is Supermassive (and even looks just like Supermassive!) but adds the modulation slider, with an even easier workflow.

Semi-lastly, I’m giving serious consideration to buying Cinematic Rooms this Black Friday, as after the demo it is far and away the fastest workflow I’ve experienced thus far for front-to-back depth and width, and the crossfeed-feedback-delay/filtering controls give a uniquely accurate, or huge and deep sound. MTurboReverb can do this as well, but it is a different and treacherous workflow unless I take the time to set up a custom device in MXXX, and for now I mostly use it for sound design as my time has become very limited. I may even sell Nimbus and R4, depending on how I can learn to manipulate the depth of the tail in Cinematic Rooms, whether it is up to the Bloom parameter or the Echo parameter or more.

The only other consideration is Precedence or MIR Pro (Spaces perhaps if it can do stage placement) but I’m not sure. Thus far I haven’t gotten too much more out of Precendece than Panagement though I know the different modes are useful for wet and dry sources. Precedence comes with the additional benefit of instance-linking, so I can control the positioning of multiple instruments in a mix from a unified interface. This is the primary selling point for me. MMixingRevolution may introduce something similar, we’ll just have to see.

Lastly, I bought IRCAM Flux Verb v3 during the promotion... it’s like mega-nimbus as far as the style of controls goes but with a pretty convoluted workflow, IMO quite poorly laid-out for UX. Interesting sounds, but you spend much of the time battling comb filtering. It actually can sound really, really good sometimes... but it is so weird. I have 3 months before I can sell it, so I’ll see if I can find some places for it in my workflow but I’m not super confident it’ll be sticking around.

MPX native reverb vst <3

and got TC Electronic M2000 . great multi-fx, cheap...

Eventide: Black Hole
Exponential Audio: R2, PhoenixVerb
iZotope: NeoVerb
Lexicon: Native Reverb
Metric Halo: HaloVerb
Reverb Foundry: Tai Chi
Soundtoys: Little Plate
Valhalla: Room, Supermassive
Waves: Abbey Road Plates, H-Reverb, others
Zynaptiq: Adaptiverb

Too many reverbs to actually use, of course, and if you took away the ones I use regularly, I could make do with the others. But a few comments:

Lexicon was the most expensive, and my go-to for years. But I hated that the different algorithms were on separate plugins—you can’t jump from trying out a small room to a hall. Valhalla Room took over a lot of that use, at a fraction of the cost.

Abbey Road Plates is nice when it’s the sound you want.

R2 is a newer acquisition—instantly impressive how well presets just fit in the track. I’m used to doing a lot of tweaking, it’s interesting to have one that fits so well on a huge number of presets with no changes.

Adaptiverb is on another level, definitely could be huge for someone making soundscapes. I’ve had it for years, but my old Mac could only accommodate it in spotty fashion till I got my 2019 Mac Pro. It’s a major CPU hit, and huge latency, but can do things the others can’t get close to.

Tai Chi...dropping Monday, I'll follow up in a separate post.

I wonder what this will be? "Ensemble character reverb" suggests to me something vintage, probably 224XL related (as HD Cart is 480 related), unless there are some vintage reverbs that could fit into that category with a more obvious connection to the name I'm missing. As the Reverb Foundry blurb specifically calls out their "emulation" focus, rather than pure new reverbs, it would seem to be something at least inspired or modelled on some existing reverb box. And something with a flowing, modulating tail.

Another couple of days before all is revealed...

Super impressed with this one—if the reverb police busted in right now and said, "dude, you can only keep one, you got five seconds", I'd have to say this. I’m not even sure how mad I’d be about it.

First, it sounds great. We aren't in the dark ages of reverb, a lot of them sound great. What sets this apart is the completeness and depth of programmability.

But the thing that makes this a desert-island reverb is that all that depth is wrapped in a very intuitive interface. I didn't even look for the manual till a couple of nights ago, to check some assumptions. Everything is grouped logically and makes sense. The advanced features are under a tabbed section—if you want a ducked or compressed reverb, click the tab and everything you need is there, otherwise it's out of view. And a lot of control over internal reverb and reflections paths (bit depth, chorusing). You don't have to be a tweak-head, it's also easy to pull up a great sounding preset, rearrange the reverb balance in the multiband section to suit what you're working one, maybe try algorithms, and quickly get a new great sounding preset.

And I do like this feature: Controls, and in some cases sections (dynamics, equalizer), have lock icons. Click to lock, then loading a preset won't change that setting (you can still adjust manual). So, if you have presets that are fully wet, to use on a send, and want to work inline instead, just lock the dry/wet knob so you don't have to keep twiddling the mix as you shuffle through presets.

I'm not associated, just lucky to be able to try it out ahead of release, I'll stop before I sound like a shill. It's now announced on Reverb Foundry's website, so I guess I can spill the beans. There's a 14-day trial period.

"Liquidsonics/RF reverb plugin sounds great" - shocker! At least that much isn't a spoiler, or a surprise!

I agree I find their interfaces and design stellar, in the main. They look great, modern without being techy, have good control without be overloaded with knobs in your face, a nice sense of space and aesthetics. All good stuff.

Yes, you have the basic idea, definitely from that lineage. Small rooms to big chorused halls at the root of it.

Any chance you could be more specific and confirm if this is indeed a 224 or 224 XL emulation?

If so, I am extremely interested. I refuse to buy into UAD, and the Softube+NI 224 is pretty good but also woefully incomplete.... in other words, I've been waiting a long time for other developers to do a proper 224 emulation (well, one that doesn't require buying a chunk of hardware, e.g. UAD).

Fingers crossed!

It hasn’t been released yet so it’s probably unfair to ask or to possibly try to get someone to break an nda by posting anything more specific. It’s only another couple of days before the full information will be released, so…

But I share your feelings on the 224…