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.
See also: Best FREE Reverb VST PluginsAirwindows 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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Last Updated on March 25, 2021 by Tomislav Zlatic.
