Madrona Labs Aaltoverb 2 v2.0.3 WiN

Aaltoverb is a reverberator designed with a focus on completely smooth tweakability. Any of its controls including the reverb size can be adjusted without making clicks. This feature can bring fresh sounds to a mix, and particularly shines in a live performance setup.

Our new popup UI in version 2.0 gives you access to MIDI learn and to an individual, syncable LFO for each main parameter.

About the sound

We made Aaltoverb after hearing from people who wanted to use the reverb from our synthesizer Aalto as a standalone effect. Aalto's reverb is meant to sound good as part of Aalto, but like the spring reverbs in our favorite vintage synthesizers that inspired it, it's not at all flexible. Our focus as a company is always on new tools for performance, so we thought: what additional features would a performance reverb have?

We've already mentioned Aaltoverb's most remarkable trick: you can smoothly change the size of the virtual space that the sound is reverberating in. This results in in pitch shifting that is reminiscent of what tape delays do when the speed changes. But instead of a single speed, the shift applies to the whole acoustic space, vibrating “air” and all. So a giant room can turn smoothly into a small and natural sounding chamber, and then into a tiny and very unnatural resonator. With longer decay times, weird spring-like beasties can be found along the way.

The decay control works in tandem with the size control to set an accurate T60 (the number of seconds it takes for a sound to decay by 60 decibels) for any space, even the weird ones. And at the top of its range, this decay time jumps to infinty as Aaltoverb's freeze function is seamlessly faded in. Freezing results in a truly endless wash of sound without audible loop points. It's great for ambient performance, making room tones, and hopefully some things you'll do that we haven't thought of yet.

The tone control also offers more than meets the eye. It's not the tame EQ a typical reverb provides. In the middle of its range, right near 1000 Hz, it does have a subtle and transparent effect that's good for tweaking a mix. But beyond that it gets much more drastic, like the isolator in a DJ mixer. At the low end, it muffles everything to an outside-the-warehouse thump, while the dramatic lift at the high end can fade a whole track “up and out” or add a real sizzle to vocals.

Though our presets cover the basics, we hope that the delightfully tweakable interface leads you to making your own modulated spaces right away.

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