Reverb Foundry Tai Chi

NIGEL JOPSON’S mix is in slowly evolving motion

LiquidSonics — whose products include Cinematic Rooms (Resolution V19.5) and Bricasti homage Seventh Heaven (Resolution V16.4) — has announced the addition of Reverb Foundry to their portfolio, adding three additional plug-ins. The most recent release Tai Chi, ‘blends the design styles of multiple reverb houses in a fantastic new creation fit for the modern Atmos-equipped workflow era’.

Reverb plug-ins broadly fall into two categories: the simulation of actual acoustic spaces as realistically as possible, or artistic audio enhancement. Of the latter category, we’re used to seeing either attempts to emulate vintage hardware, or software which aims to bring a bit of digital magic to reverb design. Tai Chi definitely belongs with the latter concept — although bearing in mind developer Matt Hill’s programming of Seventh Heaven, and his work on what is now Slate Digital’s VerbSuite Classics, there are certainly times when you’re going to think: “damn, Tai Chi sounds like a Lexicon.” There is good reason for the popularity of hardware emulations — synthetic though the old boxes may sound in isolation — the digital reverbs I used as a young engineer had a way of sitting comfortably in a mix.

Creative flexibility

If you want a slap-back reverb on an electric guitar, with a bit of an SPX90 flavour, a very short decay but no low end on the actual reverb and an HF roll-off, you can dial it up in a trice on the Tai Chi. It will sound way better than an SPX90 because with Tai Chi you can trim the Diffusion, Spread, Chorus, Modulation Rate, Damping… until everything is just how you want it, and the guitar part keeps out of the way of other instruments.

This is not really a plug-in for the neophyte. The interface has all the adjustments an engineer might need, but you need to know what RT Multiply means. There are no simple ‘press here for a long reverb’ buttons, although a huge catalogue of 220 factory presets provide useful starting points. The UI is very logically arranged, with Output Mix, Treble, and Bass Contouring sections to the right. The lower central section of the interface displays Reverb Time Multipliers as a frequency plot, with three adjustable crossover points and individual multiplier control for each of four bands. Above the RT Multipliers is a 6-rotary control panel with five switchable tabs: Master, Advanced, Dynamics, Fidelity and Equaliser.

I’ll highlight some unusual or interesting controls on these panels. Master tab: the pre-delay can be locked to song BPM by selecting the tempo-sync button. The Width control works via a mid-side boost/cut approach. Spacing will alter the space between individual reflections, and reflection timing can be set relative to the reverb pre-delay or locked to the dry signal. Reflection patterns can be selected using the tiny chevrons (not so obvious to notice!) above the Roll-off control, with options of Room, Hall, Church, Garage and Stadium. Advanced tab: there’s a very comprehensive Chorus, which has a great effect, especially on longer reverbs. The spread control affects the way signals are injected into different delay lines within the reverb loops. You can control how quickly reverb builds to its highest level, and how smooth it sounds during onset and decay.

Duck the reverb

Using the controls in the Dynamics tab you can compress either the reverb alone or the summed reflections plus reverb signal (Wet setting). A key feature, which I really liked, was the ability to Duck the reverb until the source is silent/not playing. This is especially effective on a vocal or a strident guitar chord, where you mainly want the reverb to swell up as the chord is decaying, or the singer is tailing off. The compressor Release control is adjustable up to a generous 2.5 seconds, so just about any musical instrument can benefit, with a high degree of control possible. Manual rides may still be preferred for a lead vocal, but once you start using ducking on instruments with a reverb insert, you won’t want to go back to ‘full on all the time’. Even a tiny amount of ducking on instrument parts seems to clean up a mix.

Fidelity controls: if I want to return to the ’80s 12-bit crunchy sound, I can! A selection of bandwidth limiting and bit-reduction controls can get audio fuzzing, and even cutting out if bit-depth is set low enough. Equaliser: handy Low and High shelving, with adjustable turnover frequencies, plus low pass (6dB) and high pass (24dB) variable filters.

The way Tai Chi allows up to three crossover split points to be defined means there’s a huge amount of tonality tinkering available, and if you don’t use this feature then leaving the multipliers section in the Off position will save CPU cycles.

Tai Chi is a super-flexible digital reverb which will suit engineers with a clear idea of what they want to achieve with a reverb. There’s something for every application in Tai Chi. For me, a killer feature is the dynamic ducking. If you’re working on atmospheric music or SFX developing ‘unique soundscapes’, then the chorusing and modulation effects will be invaluable. Tai Chi is also available as a $99 Lite version (which can be upgraded), lacking the 7.1.6 outputs and multi-band decay contouring available in the full $199 version.

VERDICT

PROS Tuneable reverb that will sit well in a mix, rich chorus and deep modulation, 7.1.6 capability, ducking

CONS A UI scaling smaller than 70% would be useful. Fidelity (bit-depth) section could do with an Enable button like the EQ section