SPECTRAL REVERB Review

Bleass sent me a copy of their new Spectral Reverb. Aptly named, Spectral Reverb is of course, a spectral reverb. As with most spectral plugins, Spectral Reverb offers a variety of block sizes for different resolutions. This one also has “hop factor” and “smooth size” to give even more control over the quality of the reverb.

As far as the reverb goes, everything is pretty simple. You get control over decay, attack, width, and a couple filters. Where things get interesting is the little boxes underneath some of these controls. If you are familiar with Sine Machine, you’ll recognize this same mechanic, these boxes allow you to control the parameter above by a per-bin basis. The X axis works as a sort of cutoff or focus frequency, while the Y axis changes the shape of your per-bin curve. This is made more clear by the array of lines that display on the control its self while adjusting this box.

below the main reverb window is the reverb processing section. This section allows you to load one of six different spectral processors into four different slots. These spectral processors act on the reverb signal and really expand what Spectral Reverb is capable of. The effects include: spectral gate, harmony follow, spectral ducker, spectral enhancer, pitch shifter and frequency shifter.

Most of the effects are fairly subtle, and make more sense in a mixing situation. You’ll also find the same per-bin curve control boxes on some of these effects. The pitch and frequency shifters definitely cover some good territory on the sound design front. These also include those per-bin boxes, letting you create some really crazy shifting. I’d actually really love to hear these effects applied directly to the signal rather.

Over all, this is definitely a fun weird sound design reverb, and the reverb quality is nice and soft while being capable of incredibly long decays. I really love when spectral effects give you modular processing to mix and match your own signal chain. Combine this with their Spectral Resonator and you have a recipe for endless experimentation. I really enjoy seeing reverb being played around with as a creative plugin, there’s so much potential for this effect especially when combined with spectral processing.