 In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the best free Reverb VST plug-ins. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. You'll almost certainly be using Reverb in your productions and it's nice to have choices beyond the stock Reverb which came with your door. So I've put together a list of five of the best free Reverb VST plug-ins that I think you can get. Now of course, in YouTube tradition, I'm going to be doing this in reverse order starting off with number five. So in number five, I've got Sanford Reverb and I've got this in at number five, not because it's the worst sounding reverb out of the five, but because it's a little bit difficult to get into in terms of user friendliness. There's a lot of controls here. So with that in mind, I'm going to do a little mini tutorial for you here. Now if this is not the reverb for you, I encourage you to stick around anyway because the subjects which I'm going to cover as I go through the controls here are going to be useful when we're looking at the other plug-ins in this top five. So let's start off with what does it basically do? Well, it's a reverb, but it also has this big section over here for early reflections. We'll talk about that later, but they're very, very important in my opinion. Of course, we've got a mix section here and then we've got a filter section which is also very important in my opinion and then a nice little modulation unit here as well. Let's start off by listening to a dry guitar and then I'm just going to blend in some regular reverb. Now that sounds like a massive space, doesn't it? It's going to be like a cathedral or a large hall or something like that. Now whereas on other reverbs you may see like a size control, your main control here for the reverb is this time control. So I'm just going to play around with that, play the guitar again and have a listen to this. It sounds like a small room, maybe a club. And then we've got really, really big again. I'm going to leave it there for the moment because it's the easiest type of reverb to hear. Now a couple of other controls here which are useful is pre-delay. We'll talk about that in other plug-ins if it comes up. And this is really handy. It creates sort of a gap in time, a little delay before the reverb kicks in. This is good for helping to keep your original sound nice and sort of clear and up front. Okay, so you can play around with the pre-delay there. That's useful. And also this dampening control which sort of simulates I guess the way that the walls in the room absorb the sound. And with this sort of right down low the sound of the reverb is much more harsh. It picks up those transients a lot more and then as we push it up it gets softer. Now there's also a freeze control on here which I probably will never use but I'll show you what it does. Even though I've stopped my guitar. Yeah it just sort of holds on to whatever it was doing at that time. So that's the basic reverb controls. Now the issues that can occur when you're using a reverb at all is a sort of especially a low-end build-up and also some harshness in the high ends which particularly on a guitar like this when we sort of get fret sounds and things they can be sort of over exaggerated with reverb. So it's very handy indeed that this has these filter controls a low cut and a high cut filter. I preach about this all the time when I'm talking about using reverb and it's often the main reason why I say you need to have reverb on a bus because often you'll need to have an e-cube for it in the bus. However you wouldn't need to do that with this reverb because that job is done by this filter. Let's just have a listen to this guitar again. It's got a lot of low-end build-up. I'm going to push up this low cut filter and you'll hear that it becomes a lot more sort of or less muddy all in all. Yeah so it still sounds like the same size room and everything but it's just a little less muddy. Now the other thing is I say you the reverb can suddenly pick up these sort of squeaks and things on things like guitars or it can all sound a bit harsh. So again you can use this high cut filter. Now obviously at the moment I've got the mix set so you can hear the reverb really high. I'd probably dial that back somewhat. Now the last thing I want to talk about before we go on to these early reflections is modulation. This can be very very handy in just making this reverb sound a little less sort of clinical more organic sounding and essentially what modulation is going to be doing is adding some pitch variations to the reverb. Yeah you'll hear how it sounds but what I'm going to start off by doing is turning down the original guitar so only hearing the reverb. I'm going to switch on the modulation and I'm going to turn the dials up so it's very extreme. It'll sound terrible but you'll get the idea. So it sounds like we've got this sort of chorus effect if you like on the actual reverb sound. Now normally I would have the depth all the way back down here perhaps and then the speed a lot lower as well. Let's have a listen to this. Now let's blend in the original guitar. So that's modulation also a very useful feature. Now what I'm going to do finally is get rid of the reverb completely and talk about early reflections. I think early reflections are very very useful. You can create this immediate space for an instrument without having to use reverb at all in fact sometimes. So let's put the early reflections up high up here and then I'll just start switching them on. So basically what you've got is three early reflections for the left and the right side here. And each of those has controls for time which is usually a fairly short period of time panning and the level. I'm not going to play around with all those controls but I am going to switch on all of these early reflections here just to give you an idea of what it's doing. Let's have a listen to this guitar now. Let's take out the dry guitar and just listen to the reflections. You can hear if you're listening on headphones or through studio monitors they're panned really hard left and right. So let's sort of blend in a little bit more how I'd have it realistically so I wouldn't have them up that loud. Now this is really handy when you've got a very dry sounding thing like a guitar or a vocal or what have you and you just want to start off by putting it into a bit of space without making it feel like it's moved a long way away which can be the effect of reverb. But if you use the combination of both of these things you can get some really nice effects without feeling like your instrument is disappearing into the background when you've got it in a full mix. This is isolated here at the moment so it doesn't matter quite so much. But often when you put an instrument in a full mix and you put on loads of reverb it can suddenly sound like it's disappeared. So anyway so what I would normally do is set up some early reflections blend those in and then blend in my actual reverb like so. Now the point for me is I would often use a delay effect of some kind for this for these early reflections if it doesn't have this feature on the reverb effect like most or like many don't okay. So it's amazing with this free plugin that you get everything in one package here. You've got your early reflections, you've got your reverb, you've got your modulation and your filters all in one plugin and that's why this plugin is in the top five even though it takes a little bit of figuring out. Now if a simple straightforward approach is what you're looking for then in number four I've got Tau reverb number four. This has some great functions it doesn't have the early reflections that we saw in the first plugin but it is much more straightforward to use. Let's just have a listen to it on that guitar again. Again I'm just going to exaggerate things a little bit as I'm using this so you can clearly hear it but it's a very pleasant sounding reverb and of course we've got our size control over here so we can go to a smaller room or a huge room of course with something like this you would get a lot of low end build up and that's where you would want to be using your low cut filter over here and perhaps on this guitar even that high cut filter. Just like the last plugin we've got some modulation which I think is very useful we'll pop some of that on there. Oh that may be a little bit too much let's just go down and then we also have some diffusion again this takes some of the harshness out of the reverb I found it sort of just softens it so this is nice to have up high and also some pre-delay as well so again we get that sort of a bit of delay before the reverb kicks in that can really help to have a nice clear sounding instrument with that reverb on it. So that's Tau reverb number four. Oh by the way are you finding this video useful? If you are go ahead and hit the like button for me do it right away so that you don't forget if you're not finding it useful if you just hate being told about free useful stuff then definitely go ahead and hit the dislike button twice and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos. Now back to this video. So vertebrae basic two may seem like a strange choice for my number three pick because it's got way less features than the first two I've shown you however I think that's its strength because a lot of the time you just want a quick and easy straightforward solution for your reverb and this may be the answer for you in that case. It has very few features which means that I think you have to use it in a specific way which we'll talk about later but first of all let's look at the features it does have. We've got four different reverbs here plate room hall and lush hall and then we've just got a mix control that's it so let's have a listen to the plate reverb to begin with and room hall and finally lush hall so that's how you use it that's all I can tell you about this plugin but there are some limitations of course because I really do feel for example that you should be using most of the time a low cut filter before your reverb which means that to do that effectively and maintain your original signal yeah you need to put this on fully wet and have it on a bus and then blend in that original signal I've actually got that pre-prepared here we'll put this on hall if I hadn't if I don't have the original signal it sounds like this crazy and now with that original guitar in now because I've got it on a bus that means on that bus just before the reverb I can use an EQ you can just use a stock EQ that you got with your door and I can do a low cut and maybe even a high pass and with that switched on it sounds like this that's how I would use this plugin which is my number three pick two now I definitely hesitated to have this plugin Valhalla supermassive in at number two the reason is this is a fantastic sounding plugin but it's got a fairly specific use case scenario however it does sound so good I put it in at number two I'm going to play a little bit of this guitar and then I'm going to stop it suddenly so you can hear the reverb and then you'll know what I mean listen to that tail I'll play it again it just has some wonderful things going on when you really want a super massive reverb as its name suggests so it's very very good at that now this is fairly tame at the moment or play you some much bigger examples but first of all let's just take a quick look at the controls we've got the mix here that you'd expect to see we've got width which is very useful because it sounds very nice with some nice stereo width on this particular effect delay and warp this is the delay but we've also got some variation on the delay so it's not the same length all the time feedback and density is a bit more like you have on a delay effect this controls for that then of course we've got modulation as we saw on the other plugins and the filters the high and low cut filters they're very very useful for a plugin like this now at the bottom we can see this mode here this one's set to Gemini now each one of the modes that we have and there's a number of them has a very different characteristic and it gives an explanation of what they do just down below here as you hover over it I'm not going to change anything at the top here I'm just going to play this the same guitar part with all these settings but in different modes now have a listen here's Hydra Centaurus Sagittarius and so on and so forth I guess there's around about sort of eight to ten different modes that you can choose from so look that has a really massive effect on the overall sound without you know actually changing anything up the top here now I did mention that this is not really the biggest that you can get there's some presets I'm selecting a little bit off screen here I'm just going to go through to some I'm going to go to the massive presets I'm just going to go the whole hog let's have a listen to Final Frontier you can hear that wonderful build up there so I think that's something that you may want sometimes but maybe not a lot of the time of course we can you know take the mix down here so it's not so exaggerated it's still pretty massive even when it's low in the mix now apart from that massive sound you can actually do some other effects which are not really reverbs at all let's go to a chorus effect let's just choose one here and have a listen now so this is where it's mostly taking advantage of the delay and the modulation that kind of thing let's go for some echoes on a guitar try this one reverse eighth note so in my opinion this particular plugin is really good for more like special effects okay and sort of soundscapes and things like that so in that way it's got a sort of very narrow use case however it does it so so well when you do want it to do that especially considering it's completely free so that's why I've picked it for number two now before we go on to our number one spot I just want to make a couple of honorable mentions these are plugins which I considered during the process of picking my top five but these didn't quite make it to the top five for various reasons the first of these is kr reverb fs a nice little plugin we can control with this interface um for example the early reflections here and the diffusion as you can see here then we have a late or sort of a this is more like your sort of size thing which is the main reverb the late size and then we have some decay with that a wet dry mix here and then a listening position here as well um a reasonable sounding reverb you may love it if you download it and try it out but for me I just didn't didn't quite gel with me for whatever reason now the next one I'd like to talk about is called devil spring reverb now this is a nice little reverb in fact but it's got such a narrow use case to know that's why I didn't have it in there but if you do want um a sort of a fairly vintage sounding spring reverb sound this may be the one for you let's have a quick listen so those are the ones that didn't quite make it but which one made it to number one one so we're at number one I've chosen m convolution easy from melda production not the easiest name to remember in the world and also let's face it not the prettiest interface in the world now it's user friendly this interface but it's just not that pretty so why have I chosen this for number one well I've chosen it for one reason only that is the sound I think that the sound you get from this particular plugin is very very nice indeed and remember your listeners won't be seeing the interface they'll be judging the sound of your music now the reason there's not lots and lots of sort of buttons on this to affect the sound of the reverb is because this is a convolution reverb now if you don't know what that is a brief explanation this is a way of sort of modeling or simulating reverb spaces or just spaces using something called impulse responses now these are little recordings which are used to sort of recreate that space okay so you don't get lots and lots of sort of fine control over the reverb but you do get a very natural representation of specific types of spaces now there are a few controls you've got your dry wet control here you've got a widening control and you do have your high and low pass filters but really what you're going to be doing with this one is blending in the sound of the reverb with this control over here and then going through and choosing the space which suits you most let's start off with this one here this is on a hall space here have a listen let's go to another one now I'm exaggerating this so you can hear it clearly there but I think these are just wonderful sounding and you've got a lot of them as well these are just the hall spaces here let's go to a chamber I haven't even tried any of these I'll randomly pick a large chamber let's have a listen smaller space there but very very nice indeed if that's what you want let's go through to these room ones here okay so we'll just go and go to a large room we've even got a living room down here let's have a listen to that and we've got some plate reverbs here or reverbs I should say have a listen so lots and lots of choices there but it's you're really setting it up using mostly that process looking through thinking about what kind of space you want this instrument to exist in and then trying out some of these presets perhaps applying some widening and a high and low pass filter that's it I know many of you are going to disagree with me but that is my number one pick that's my top five what's yours let me know in the comments down below about that if you think I've missed any definitely let me know about that so that everybody can check out your favorite reverb plugins check out the links in the description down below for all of the plugins in today's video and also check out my link for patreon.com where for as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this I'll see you in the next video