We don’t need another great reverb, let alone another great Valhalla reverb/echo. But we get one anyway. Sean Costello and Valhalla say this one is focused on transparency and realism — plus modulation and a bunch of echo modes when you want them. The now is FutureVerb.
The coloration and “metallic” sounds you get out of algorithmic reverbs are sometimes exactly what you want. But we’ve got that, so FutureVerb goes a different, fresh direction. Five are based on acoustic spaces with realistic results, with three creating “huge ambient spaces and tight nonlinear reverbs.”
Futuristic gets overused, yes, but here it’s differentiated from the vintage ‘verb sound. (Some of the other reverbs I like most at the moment also go this direction, with very different results, so — more on that later. We’re due for a shark week-style Reverb Week, aren’t we?)
Sound samples:
Here’s what’s in there. On the reverb side:
- Room, but clearer and more realistic, they say
- Chamber (denser early reflections, more low-end decay vs. Room)
- Plate — minus the boom of real plates, minus the artifacts of digital plates, and I’m sold already…
- Hall
- Cathedral
- Space — but not the Valhalla space you know, with completely different techniques
- Frozen — “a freeze reverb that eventually stops” (good idea; I’ve actually hand-rigged some effects to do this!)
- Nonlin, nonlinear but with “more echo density and realism” and less metallic qualities
And then all the echo modes, which also give you some additional coloration opportunities in case you want some spice with all that natural-sounding transparency:
- Modern
- Tape
- Digital
- Analog
- Detune
- Reverse
- ReverseOctUp
- ReverseOctDown
- ReverseOctUpDown
- Sparkles
- Swarm
- LoFi
These are tuned with varying degrees of grit and warmth, so you get this distinctive character of paired echo modes with your reverb. It’s part of what sets Valhalla stuff apart.
And as if that weren’t enough customization, they also add different “color” modes that adjust both equalization and high-frequency decay profiles:
- Bright
- Neutral
- Dark
- Studio (wait, that one’s not obvious — they’re modeling this on 60s/70s studio recording: “A steep high cut filter at 10 kHz is combined with a steep 600 Hz low cut filter.”)
Cleverly, the color modes literally impact the color of the UI.
Need this? No. Deserve this? Probably not; I haven’t been very good this year. Could we be doing something with our lives other than wiling away the hours listening to reverb decays? Wait, stop — yes, we could, but why?
Valhalla us! This one is $50.
Plus, like, kind of nice rainbow colors.
VST2.4, VST3, AAX, AU, macOS all the way back to 10.9 Mavericks, Windows back to Ye Olde Windowsen 7.
And you also get a lot of lush writing about how they thought about this and a manual you actually want to read. Curl up and dream of reverbs:
Introducing ValhallaFutureVerb
ValhallaFutureVerb: The Controls
ValhallaFutureVerb: The Echo Modes
ValhallaFutureVerb: The Reverb Modes
ValhallaFutureVerb: The Color Modes
Here’s a video without anyone talking and without anyone’s face, also playing that thing with strings that I’ve never quite worked out (where are the keys?):
Here’s the appropriate song to sing about the software: