Reverb plugins are an essential tool for music production and sound design – it’s impossible to imagine modern music without them! Reverbs are designed to put your “dry” sounds into a space such as a drum room, church, cave or hall.
There are numerous expensive reverb plugins on the market which are well worth exploring but it’s also perfectly possible to create “professional” sounding tracks using nothing but free reverb plugins, of which I list 3 of the best below.
Best free reverb for epic delays and reverb: Valhalla Supermassive
Sean Costello’s Valhalla DSP plugins have found their way into numerous pro-studios across the globe because they are all genuinely fantastic audio tools and they’re affordable too. Amongst Valhalla’s premium plugins you’ll find three free plugins including Valhalla Space Modulator and Valhalla Freq Echo – both of which are worth downloading – but it’s the incredible Valhalla Super Massive I want to focus on here.
Make some space in your plugins folder for Valhalla Supermassive. This incredibly versatile plugin has been designed from the ground up for creating massive delays and reverbs and is my go to source for otherworldly delays, epic reverbs, and mutating, swirling feedback.
Supermassive offers 14 varied reverb/delay “modes” each of which serves up a different combination of attack and decay and echo density.
Supermassive might be free but it’s not short on features. At its core, Supermassive uses a variety of feedback delay networks and each delay in the structure can be up to 2 seconds long. By adjusting the unique WARP control you can move from echoes that slowly fade in to cascading harmonic echoes, and lush reverbs and huge reverbs that decay way over the course of minutes.
How does it sound? In a word: Epic! I reach for Supermassive whenever I need to add some lush and cinematic vibes to my soft synths (Supermassive combined with a few instances of Dune 3 VST is pretty much all I need to create an infinite variety of Cyberpunk/Bladerunner type cinematic scores).
Supermassive features a mix (wet/dry), EQ high and low cuts, presets, tooltips and more – this is a free plugin that can sit proudly alongside Valhalla’s premium plugins.
Hear Valhalla’s Supermassive in action in the video below and then don’t hesitate to download your free copy from the Valhalla DSP website.
Supermassive is available in VST/VST3 formats for Mac and PC.
Best free vintage plate reverb plugin: TAL-Reverb-4
It seems like the classic Tal Reverb plugin has been around in one form or another for almost as long as the VST format itself! Now on version 4, Tal-Reverb-4 remains an essential freebie for any musician or producer on the hunt for a quality free reverb.
Given that TAL-Reverb-4 is 100% it’s amazing just how versatile and useful this plugin while also being incredibly easy to use.
Watch the video tutorial for an indepth overview of how to best use TAL-Reverb-4 and get to grips with reverb in general.
I find TAL-Reverb-4 is especially useful for quickly dialing in an 80s vibe to my drum loops and keys.
Download TAL-Reverb-4 here. Note you’ll need a 64-bit host to run Tal-Reverb-4 so if you’re on a Windows 32-bit machine you’ll need to download an older version of Tal-Reverb.
Tal-Reverb-4 is available in VST, VST3, AU and AAX formats.
Best free all purpose reverb plugin: MCharmVerb
A lot of the free reverbs out there are designed to cover specific sonic territory but sometimes you just need a powerful “bread and butter” reverb that you can slap on a channel, tweak to suit your tastes and then move on.
MCharmVerb from MeldaProduction is one such reverb. This is a simplified version of their premium MTurboReverb plugin but it still retains enough core controls to satisfy all but the most demanding users.
With MCharmVerb you can adjust the size, length and pre-delay of your reverb and also adjust also wet/dry, gain and stereo width.
There are plenty of “pro” features too and nice touches such as a global randomize button, resizable GUI and the ability to control multiple parameters using a single ‘multiparameter’ knob which comes in handy for automation.
Best of all MCharmVerb is part of MeldaProduction’s MFreeFXBundle, 37 100% free effects covering filtering, mixing, mastering duties and more. (It’s all 100% free but MeldaProduction hope you’ll like them so much you’ll upgrade to the premium versions).
See the MeldaProduction website for more details of MCharmVerb.