My Top 5 Reverb Plugins And What Makes Them Great

Different sources call for different spaces. A drum kit needs a different treatment from a string section, and sustained strings may need a completely different reverb from staccato strings. For drums, I often want the sound of a small live room with tight tails that don’t spill into the next hit. A long hall can easily make the same part muddy and unnatural.

I try to imagine the music being performed live in a room, even when the track is entirely electronic. Where is each instrument positioned? How far away is it? If I picture a horn section at the back of the room, I might sit it lower in the mix and give it more of that room’s reverb than an instrument positioned right at the front. Thinking this way creates a sense of depth that simple left-to-right panning cannot achieve.

These are the five reverb plugins I was reaching for when I originally wrote this article in 2018, and what made each one stand out.

My go-to reverb for that classic, lush sound.

The Universal Audio emulation of the Lexicon 224 is remarkably close to the original hardware. Having used both extensively, I found them very much alike. The 224 became a studio classic for good reason, and it was my first choice for a huge range of sounds.

This is probably the only reverb that makes me use the word lush. It really does describe its character. There’s a creamy quality to its vocal reverbs, particularly the vocal plate, that makes a voice sit beautifully in a mix.

It offers eight reverb programmes: two small halls, a large hall, vocal plate, chamber, percussion plate, room and constant-density plate. That might seem limited compared with plugins offering hundreds of presets, but each programme has a distinctive, recognisable Lexicon character. Quality matters far more than the number of options.

For placing a sound somewhere in a believable three-dimensional space.

dearVR Pro was unlike the conventional reverbs I was using at the time. It combines spatial positioning with virtual acoustics, allowing you to move a source around a listener — left, right, behind, above or below — and hear how the selected environment changes its character.

Imagine choosing a church and moving an instrument towards the back of it. The plugin doesn’t simply make that instrument quieter or more distant: it models the acoustic impression of the source being played from that position. That made it a genuinely useful tool for creating depth.

Instead of thinking about a mix as just left and right, it encouraged me to think about front, back, height and everything in between. That was what made it so exciting.

For convincing recordings of real acoustic environments.

East West Spaces 2 is a convolution reverb with an enormous range of spaces to explore. Its impulse responses cover conventional rooms, churches and public buildings, alongside more unusual environments such as catacombs and train stations.

What impressed me most was the realism of the recorded spaces. There are multiple variations to choose from, so it’s possible to find a room that suits the source rather than trying to force one preset to work for everything.

The controls aren’t as extensive as those of some algorithmic reverbs, but there’s enough flexibility to adjust the sense of room size, decay and frequency balance. When I wanted the impression of an instrument actually being performed in a real space, this was a strong choice.

A versatile all-rounder, especially on drums.

The AMS RMX16 Expanded was one of those reverbs I could reach for almost anywhere in a mix. Its expanded selection of programmes offered plenty of starting points, and with some tweaking I could usually find the sound I wanted.

I particularly liked it on drums. It has some excellent room-style treatments, including short, punchy sounds that can approach a slapback-delay effect. That makes it useful for adding character without washing the kit in a long reverb tail.

The plugin was designed to recreate the much-loved original AMS hardware and its algorithms. For anyone looking for one versatile, characterful reverb rather than a huge collection of specialised tools, it was a compelling option.

My choice for working with unusual, custom impulse responses.

Last but by no means least is Waves IR-360. It came with a substantial impulse-response library, but that wasn’t the main reason I used it. The real attraction was the ability to load impulse responses I’d recorded myself over the years, including some used in our Kontakt sampler instruments.

It gives you useful control over room size and early and late reflections. I didn’t find its bundled library as inspiring as the spaces in East West Spaces 2, but the flexibility to use my own recordings more than made up for that.

Some of my favourite impulse responses came from strange environments — washing machines, filing cabinets and other places you wouldn’t normally associate with a reverb. For sound design, those unusual spaces can be far more interesting than another perfectly polished hall.