Reverb

ATMOSYNTH built-in module

A room computed rather than recorded, with every control a real one. What comes in is reflected off the walls of a modelled space, spread by a diffuser and sent round eight delay lines that feed each other, losing a little each time round — so the tail can be as short or as long as you ask, and changes while it rings. Space chooses the room, from a small ambience to a cathedral, and the decay time that goes with it; Decay rate scales that time from a quarter to four times. Style is the kind of reverb: modern is clean and natural, vintage is the grainier, darker sound of an early digital unit with a wandering modulation, and plate is a sheet of steel, dense and bright from the first moment with no walls to reflect off. A change of style fades one room out and the next in. Pre-delay is the gap before the room answers. Character moves from a clean, transparent tail, through a lively one whose reflections and echoes stand out, to a moving, chorused one. Brightness is how much the air and the walls take off the top: dull and absorbent at one end, ringing at the other. Distance is where you stand: near, the reflections are loud and bright and the tail arrives with them; far, they are fainter and the tail takes longer to build. Thickness makes the tail denser and holds a loud one down with a soft knee. Stereo width runs from mono, through the room as it is, to wider than it. The decay can be shaped by frequency: Low decay and High decay scale how long the lows and the highs last against the middle, below and above the frequencies beside them. Low cut and High cut take the bottom and the top off what the room returns. Freeze holds the tail as it is, for as long as it is on, and lets nothing new into it. It is an input as well: what arrives there freezes the room while it is above one half, so a gate or a square LFO holds the tail in time and lets it go again, and a negative depth turns a Freeze that is on off instead. Ducking turns the room down while something is arriving, by up to the decibels it says, so a part stays clear and the tail fills the gaps. Auto gate cuts the tail off once the input has been quiet for the hold time — the gated sound of an eighties drum. Dry and Wet are summed, each set on its own; the dry signal never passes through the room. Its tail outlives the note that made it — give it one instance for the whole patch, or each note takes its room with it. Wet is an input as well, with a depth for how far a signal there moves it: an envelope into it lets the room bloom as a note ends.