Airwindows offers Verbity, a freeware reverb plugin for macOS, Windows, and Linux in AU and VST formats.
Many of you will already know that Airwindows (Chris Johnson) is a prolific creator of freeware plugins. So, before anything else, I’d like to acknowledge the time and effort that goes into his work. All of his plugins are free, but he has a Patreon account if you’d like to show some support.
Airwindows believes Verbity to be his best reverb to date, which is quite a claim from the man himself. Inspired by reverb masters Bricasti, Airwindows experiments in feedforward reverb topology led to the creation of Verbity.
It makes sense that Bricasti provided inspirations as their units are all about musicality and ease of control, which sums up Verbity pretty well.
Verbity uses the same matrices as the previous Reverb and MatrixVerb plugins, but the three reverb banks interact very differently. Each bank feeds forward to the next, instead of feeding back on itself, with the last bank feeding back to the start again.
As someone who appreciates a nice GUI, I can say it’s never about style over substance. Having clear and functional controls is always the priority. Airwindows says he sticks to simple non-GUI interfaces because they are more reliable, and he’d rather spend time improving sound, not visuals.
He also says that he doesn’t want his plugins to encourage formulaic work, which I think is a nice reminder to trust what we hear and not what we see.
As musicians or engineers, we spend a lot of time learning the rules or guidelines that we stay close to most of the time, whether that’s music theory or standard kick drum compression settings for a rock track. When we progress, we learn how/when we can break the rules, like when and how far we can play outside of the tonal center before bringing it back inside.
The point is, the only rule that matters is if it sounds good, it’s right, so I like Airwindows just listen and forget everything else approach.
Verbity has four sliders that you could map to a MIDI controller to be more hands-on; Bigness, Longness, Darkness, and Wetness. You’ll hear what they do, so just play with them. Wetness up to 0.5 doesn’t attenuate the dry signal at all; beyond 0.5, the dry signal attenuates as the wet increases.
Verbity is many things; it’s big, subtle, spacious, lush, dreamy, and always simple. Airwindows has encyclopedic knowledge to share on all things audio; check out his YouTube, too.
Download: Verbity (369 KB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU plugin format for Windows, macOS, Linux)
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15 Comments
Neytcev
onI like its sound , but i personally don’t use plugins without good skins …
John
onYour loss ;)
Abner Khuzwayo
on😂😂😂
Brenny C
onEasily amused, eh?
A guy who loves authentic Thousand Island dressing
onAt least you’re honest (or hopefully just trolling).
Illfrog
onI’d rather have a good sounding plugin that literally is just a poop emoji poorly drawn than an ok sounding plugin that looks beautiful. Looks are just made to take your attention away from sound sometimes. At that less strain on the computer.
Rodrigo
onVerbity is wonderful, and while we’re talking about it, another one has been released: Galactic, for ambient music approach and lush pads. Chris Johnson is a collective in one person.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks for the info about Galactic, I’ll check it out!
Synthiements
onI was amazed when I first heard the demo for Verbity on GS! Such a good sounding reverb. U
sually I stay away from Airwindows plugins due to the lack of visual feedback, but in the case of this simple, 4 parameter reverb it doesn’t really matter (dynamics plugin without GR meter are another story).
Seba
onThis reminds me of “Giant Verb” from “Digital Systemics Emulations”:
https://sites.google.com/site/digitalsystemic/home/giant-verb
You should really mention this young developer from France. He deserves it. His plugins are all free and have a good quality!
Tomislav Zlatic
onHi Seba, it’s a great plugin and we already featured it on BPB: https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2020/12/29/giant-verb/
130R
onIf anyone uses Ableton it’s really easy to map Airwindows controls to macros in Live so they basically function like a native Live device.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThat’s a handy tip, thanks!
Animus
onYep, great tip/. i make template racks for all VST plugins this way. Especially with Live 11’s ability to have up to 16 macros, it’s really nice.
4113nd3
onIt’s alright. I think it works the best with “bigness” and “longness” knobs to minimum and a lot of darkness. So suitable for small dark rooms. But the more you open up the controls, the more grainy and “metallic” it comes. Diffusion and modulation controls, that seem to be a standard even in free reverbs are needed here. I feel it sounds a bit dated and reminds me a bit of some of the 90s rack units (Alesis reverbs etc), so if you’re going for a sound like that this could be for you. Otherwise I don’t think it really does anything that other reverbs don’t already do.
That “Galactic” reverb however feels much more usable with it’s Replace and Detune controls.