Check these tips for getting around Soundtoys’ SuperPlate reverb

Our friends in Vermont have shared this video tour of their SuperPlate reverb plug-in – the unique, five-plate reverb with some extra options. The key: listen to pick up the differences in each of those plate models.

It’s easy to wind up in reverb overload, but it was worth waiting some years for SuperPlate’s development because there’s nothing quite like it. Yeah, you can find several good EMT plate reverbs or convolutions. But there’s nothing that gives you this catalog of different historical plates with this set of tools to control them. Or, to put it another way: it’s easy to find one typical plate, harder to find plate choices, rarer plates, and tools to tame the results.

This is a nice walkthrough of how to approach the interface with Soundtoys’ trademark interface approach. (Hey, it would be great to have a Kickstarter-backed campaign for a hardware version of Soundtoys’ stuff. I mean, you’ve already got the wooden case design!)

Highlights:

• Audition styles with the shortest setting and wet just above 50%. (Ohhhhh… heh, okay, yeah, sure, I did it the other way round with a too-long decay time. Listen to the engineers, not us misbehaving musicians/producers!)
• Input modes and input knob (for overdrive). That’s the EMT V54 tube (saturation heavy), EMT 162 solid state preamp (compression heavy, and clean.
• Decay knob: .5 – 4s is the normal range; the 4-infinite range is part of what makes SuperPlate (and LittlePlate before it) distinct from conventional hardware or hardware models and your go-to instant ambient option (or not, since you can still gate/duck that tail).
• Use input and output to manage gain staging.
• Low-cut/high-pass filters, EQ.
• Tempo-synced pre-delay inside Effect Rack. (Anyone interested if I create a couple of presets for that?)
• Notching out resonance with the EQ. (that winds up being really important using a plate – fix it before it gets into the mix!)
• Modulation: depth and rate. You can use this to keep a tail organic or as a full-blown chorus-like effect.
• Auto-Decay: aka “it’s not a ducker” (though you can kind of use it like that). It actually dynamically controls the decay time using an input signal (envelope follower). The outcome of this is really different, and you should give it a try, as I wrote previously.
• Stereo width: oh, yeah, I always forget this is there, and it’s really useful. PS, try might also pair SuperPlate with the mid/side mode of the Pulsar Neumann EQ model you hopefully downloaded for free when I mentioned it, for some really nice timbral / spatial control.

The combination of those input modes with short decays and the modulation and auto-decay makes SuperPlate a coloration and inventive sound tool, not just a conventional reverb.

I really love reverb, but it’s great to use it precisely and as a creative sound tool – and avoid the trap of wrecking a production by drenching the sound. So SuperPlate has been a great go-to, alongside Arturia’s LX-24 and the sounds-like-nothing-else Sinevibes stuff (Hollow, Vague).

It’s also worth a quick review of their demos of the different models in action, with some, uh, vintage plate pr0n (see below). But I like that short decay time audition idea. Might also try that with my other reverb plug-ins and even set up some templates accordingly.

For more:

New SuperPlate and Soundtoys 5.4 [Soundtoys]