Adam Szabo releases Solaris, a free shimmer reverb effect for Windows.
The ninth edition of the KVR Developer challenge is now live. As we have just announced in this article, there are 21 plugins submitted for this competition, all of which are free to download for anyone in the audio community.
One entry that stands out is certainly Adam Szabo’s Solaris, a shimmer reverb effect for Windows users only.
The plugin was developed with the renowned graphical programming software Flowstone, which doesn’t support Mac, unfortunately.
Apart from the host limitations, Solaris looks brilliantly designed and could well sit side by side with commercial reverb plugins due to both its great sound and appealing GUI.
It’s presented as a shimmering effect, so it’s not a generic Swiss-knife reverb but a specific one conceived for generating all sorts of ethereal and mesmerizing atmospheres.
Another great strength point of Solaris is its low CPU usage, which isn’t to be underestimated considering the fact we are talking about a shimmer reverb effect, which is usually quite CPU hungry.
The interface looks clean. It doesn’t bombard the user with many different parameters, which is good for quick user accessibility and handling creative sound design tasks with ease.
There are six main sections, equally spread out on both sides around the central big Reverb Size knob, which is the main parameter of the effect.
On the left, you can toggle on-and-off the effect, adjust the Dry/Wet control, and switch on the Warm button for warmer signal processing.
Interestingly, the Pre Delay of the reverb can be synced to the host tempo, a cool feature to be found in some commercial reverb effects like Crystalline by Baby Audio.
The Chorale section looks like a sort of vowel filter effect to add a human character to the reverberations, and the Shimmer panel on the right has two independent shimmer effects, which is great. This way, you can experiment by applying, let’s say, different transpositions to the reverbed signal for an even richer result.
Filter and Mod sections finish off the available controls of Solaris, which, even with a simple interface, can go quite deep in terms of sound design explorations.
We recommend trying it out, and if you like it, vote for it on the KVR Developer Challenge 2023 page.
Solaris is available as a 32 and 64-bit VST2 and 64-bit VST3 plugin for Windows only.
Download: Solaris (it doesn’t require an account to download it, but you need to be a KVR registered user to vote for it)
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