Developer Samuel Ferraz-Leite has released RVRSE, a free plugin that turns any one-shot sample into a tempo-synced reverse reverb riser.
If you’ve ever built a reverse reverb riser manually in your DAW, you know the drill. You copy the sample, slap a huge reverb on it, render, reverse, and then fiddle with crossfades until it sounds good. I found it fun for the first few times, but it kind of got repetitive after a while.
RVRSE is a free plugin that does it instantly.
You can load a cymbal, a noise hit, a piano note, or whatever else you want to build into, and the plugin generates a reversed, reverbed, time-stretched sweep that leads right into your original hit, locked to your project tempo.
The concept is simple, but I haven’t seen it pulled off this well for free.
Similar tools do exist, such as Whoosh by Tonsturm and Whoosh FX from UVI, but they come with a price tag and a larger feature set.
RVRSE is more streamlined and focused. It does one thing and does it well. And you can get surprisingly creative with it. Try loading a vocal phrase, or even spoken word into it, and you’ll get some pretty cool results that aren’t just basic whooshes and risers.
The controls are pretty simple. Lush adjusts the reverb amount, Length sets the riser duration (from a quarter beat all the way up to 16 beats), and Fade In shapes how the sweep enters.
You can also use the two quality settings to control the time-stretching algorithm, with the high-quality mode recommended for final renders. Oh, and the interface also lets you adjust the volume of the riser and hit independently.
The built-in stutter effect is a nice bonus. It’s pretty simple, but the Rate and Depth parameters give you some flexibility. You can automate both parameters in your DAW for more complex rhythmic builds and glitchy textures.
But what I really love here is that this is the developer’s first plugin, and it turned out so well.
RVRSE is built with iPlug2 and released under the MIT license, so it’s fully open source. The developer has 20 years of experience in the IT industry and a PhD in mathematics, and he’s open about using AI coding tools to help build the plugin.
That gets into the discussion about using AI to build plugins (which reminds me of the classic analog vs digital discussion we had for a few decades).
If you ask me, this is a positive example. Someone with a strong technical background and a good idea used AI as a coding aid to create something useful for us musicians. It’s a thin line, though, and we’re still figuring out where AI-assisted development is heading, but for me, RVRSE lands on the right side of it.
Ferraz-Leite is also working on Open Sampler, an open-source sampling engine, so RVRSE is just the starting point.
RVRSE is available in VST3 and AU formats for macOS and Windows, and also runs as a standalone application. It’s free with an optional pay-what-you-want donation.
Download: RVRSE (FREE)
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