Free reverb of the moment – Ariesverb VST

The list of available reverberation effects, even free ones, is long – very long. I’ve heard a pretty good selection of those the market has to offer. And eventhough i still dig the good UAD-1 Verbs and Magnus Ambience, the one that gets most of my attention at the moment doesn’t cost a dime and not even much cpu. I hereby confess to worship at the church of Christian Schüler aka Ariescode. Pretty sure – you will too! Cause his reverb keeps up with the best in business.

No idea where i got hold of this gem, must have been years ago, probably at KVR or something. It’s been catching lots of dust in my VST collection until it jumped in my face again. Happy end, i suppose. As you can see Ariesverb is one more plugin that doesn’t have an UI on its own (screenshot from Buzztracker‘s native VST ui, click to show full sized.). Luckily it’s the only thing it lacks. Then again it doesn’t clutter your eyes with a lousy and unsexy attempt of looking cool. Good move, ulgy looking interfaces have the ability to spoil the entire experience.

The parameters are well named and do a good job of describing what you’re most likely going to hear when tweaking them. There are 17 room geometries to pick from, the base delay can be set from 1 nanosecond to 1 second which is being multiplied by independent settings for low and high frequencies. The feedback itself has its own room entity which can be rotated around 2 axis and can be phase shifted afterwards. This opens a lot of possibilities to actually color the sound from subtle to harsh. It’d be reasonable to release it as freaky deaky amp-sim on its own.

The modulation should be handled with care unless you hate your ears. At certain base delay and frequency life settings, a mod period of 1ms a high depth gives birth to signals that will make your cats head implode. Then again it’s also capable of doing really weird phaser / flanger alike effects that sweep all around the room. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s that drive option which radically alters the sound according to the feedback loop. Last not least you can rotate the incoming and outgoing signals around 360 degrees. Hold simply freezes the buffer into atmospheres you can drown in. And don’t ask me what the Dr. Who mode does. Mr. Schüler, if you read this – explanation please!

Verdict

There are plugins with twice as much parameters which don’t cover a fracture of Ariesverbs’ soundspace. It can go from a fast and subtle chorus to a radical phaser, simulate some cheap amps, blow up rimshots to neverending pads and back. As in version 0.4 you can’t really automate much of the parameters without producing clicks but its abnormally huge soundspectrum compensates for that. Christian put many efforts into writing a documentation which describes well what’s actually happening inside > RTFM.

To give you an idea what i’ve been talking about, here are 2 minutes of walking through its presets, starting dry.

[flash http://www.ronnypries.de/sounds/ariesverb04.mp3 w=250 h=0]

Link to Ariescode Ariesverb VST

PS:Yes, this is how it looks like when i’m raving about something.

Written on April 17th, 2008 in Gear/Production. Tagged with Download, Reverb, VST-plugin