When it comes to reverb and delay, developer ValhallaDSP is up there with the best in the game. You’ll find its VintageVerb and ValhallaDelay plugins on the hard drives of countless pro producers, and at $50 a pop they’re something of a bargain too.
Valhalla’s greatest contribution to the music making world however, is its brilliant free plugin Supermassive. Now, as has become something of a pre-Black Friday tradition, that effect has been updated, hitting version 4.0 and adding a new reverb/echo algorithm named Pleiades.
First launched in 2020, Supermassive is a reverb/delay plugin that specialises in unusual and unnatural ambiences. The majority of its 21 reverb modes are designed to create extremely long and high-density feedback lines, which can create ethereal washes of ambience and long, swelling delay lines. (Pro tip: feed any sound source into its Planetarium preset to create instant ambient drones.)
Version 4.0 is something of a change of tack though. Whereas previous versions have specialised in reverb effects that are unnatural sounding by design, the Pleiades algorithm is tailored to more natural sounding ambient effects.
“Pleiades has a very fast attack, and a filtered exponential decay,” Valhalla explains. “The reverb structure is inherently dense without coloration, and the echo density can be increased by turning Density up to 100% without sounding metallic. The goal of Pleiades is to create transparent, open sounding reverbs, but it also excels at modulation effects and chorused delays.”
While it’s just one more mode to add alongside 20 others, Pleiades is significant in that it has the potential to further expand Supermassive’s usefulness beyond its remit as a go-to creative effect into more functional mixing territory. Given that flexibility, you might wonder why it’s still free.
“ValhallaSupermassive started out as a collection of weird algorithms that were interesting from a technical perspective, but not necessarily useful as standard reverbs,” the developer explains. “Supermassive has proven to be massively inspirational, not just as a product on its own, but in the development of new algorithm topologies that will be useful for future Valhalla products.
“There are certain internal limitations placed on the Supermassive algorithms: no more than 16 delay lines, a single quadrature oscillator, fixed lowpass/highpass filters shared by all delays, and so on. The limitations are useful for encouraging experimentation: how many ways can we snap together this limited set of Legos? We find these limitations inspiring, and look forward to upcoming Valhalla plugins where these limitations are removed!”
If you’ve made it this far without already heading over to the Valhalla site to download Supermassive 4.0, we highly recommend you do that now. It’s available for both Windows and Intel/M1/M2/M3/M4 Macs.
While our praise might sound like its verging on hyperbolic, given its balance of features and price, it's hard to think of another music making product we'd give such a full-throated endorsement. Hear the new sounds in action via the demos below.
