It was bound to happen. Now Eurorack hardware is emulating your computer. How the tables have turned! Or, um, mesas. But if you haven’t experienced Plateau yet, get ready to find out why it’s an instant favorite reverb — and one that a whole lot of people will want in their Eurorack skiff, too. Plateau, meet 4ms Mesa.
Well, someone has a thesurus, though personally I’m sad they didn’t go with Altiplano or Butte. (Hey, if you want to do a pedal or something, those two are free.)
Coming in August:
And what’s to say? I feel like some CDM readers have already released a couple of ambient albums featuring Plateau on every track.
Plateau is a riff on “plate”; it’s an implementation of a digital plate algorithm published in a 1997 paper by Jon Dattaro of Stanford’s storied CCRMA research center. That algorithm is popular because the basic idea of it was to avoid the unpleasant ringing that builds up in longer reverbs. Valley’s implementation expands on the core algorithm with easily patchable and tweakable modulation, exploiting the pitch shifting that Dattaro’s algorithm naturally introduces in gorgeous ways. All of that tweakability and patchability is a must in a module — that’s why I’m also lavishing early praise on Make Noise and Soundhack today. So seeing this in hardware is a no-brainer.
$399 — but it’s not a “$399 reverb.” It’s also a delay, a textural effect, a modulation effect, you can glitch stuff out, you can use it for a lot of things.
4ms also makes Meta Module, which runs VCV Rack modules, so this is even more of a natural. All of Valley’s modules are already there; Mesa just gives you a dedicated version of Plateau. (See their module finder.)
No money? I mean … Plateau is completely free in VCV Rack and its Cardinal fork. And that’s beautiful. Plateau for everybody! (It’s free as in “you still have money for beer” and as in GPLv3-licensed.) So if you wanted a DIY project and you have some ideas about doing things differently than 4ms (and some time on your hands), you could even try your hand at your own module. See my name suggestions above.
https://valleyaudio.github.io/rack/plateau