Review: Tverb Plugin by Eventide Audio

Eventide Audio has recently released Tverb, a new reverb plugin, but this plugin is different than most plugins on the market because it doesn’t try to emulate a piece of legendary gear but it emulates a production technique created by Tony Visconti for the recording of David Bowie’s track Heroes.

I’ll just give you a little background on the technique this plugin is emulating:

when recording the Heroes track Tony had only one track left to record David’s vocals so what he did was set up two extra mics in series with a noise gate
when David’s vocals got louder mic two would open up and capture more of the room ambiance and when the voice got louder again the third mic would open up capturing even more of the ambiance in the room making the sound even bigger.

Eventide Tverb Reverb Plugin — Tverb – User Interface

The workflow of this reverb plugin is pretty straightforward once you know how the technique was used to start with. The vocals come into the compressor to catch and shape out the peeks and whatnot. Then once it gets above a certain threshold the gates open up on mic two and you catch the tone of the room and then again with mic three and after that in the room settings you can cut or boost some of the lows and highs and set the diffusion and decay times and there you have a full ambiance of a room so simple but genius at the same time.

So, now that we have got the history lesson out of the way we can get into the plugin itself from left to right we have the compressor for the main mic and the two noise gates on mic two and three with their corresponding level and panning controls along the bottom and the room settings you would find on most reverb plugins. Playing around with these settings in Tverb feels more like working with a channel strip instead of a reverb plugin which is kind of refreshing for some reason.

In Tverb, you also get to play around with the mic placement and what type of mic is used like a cardioid or Omni type mic and you can also give the main mic a high or low cut. Playing around with these settings is really fun, especially when you combine the placement of mic two and three with the panning controls making the sound really huge or teeny tiny.

I have been playing around with this plugin for about a week or so now and I already love it the sound you get with the presets is awesome and there are over 100 different ones to play with so no shortage there. Building your own presets is also fun just because it feels different from working with a standard reverb plugin.

In conclusion, Tverb is a refreshing new look at the making of a plugin for emulating a production technique instead of trying to emulate a piece of gear and I like it for that. The sound quality of Tverb is awesome and sounds so lush. It is a reverb that I will be making allot of use out of in the future. Just a great tool to have in your arsenal!