Rather than provide a separate early reflections section with its own set of controls, FabFilter have come up with a single parameter that simultaneously adjusts both the balance of early reflections against reverb decay, and the character of those early reflections, in a perfectly intuitive way. The Distance knob is another case in point.
Thus, a single control covers not only modulation, but also a lot of what would normally be done by parameters such as diffusion and early reflection scatter. In the Lively region, there’s not only more motion in the tail, but the early reflections become more distinct while going further still can push things into obviously synthetic territory. At the Clean end, the reverb is dense and smooth, with early reflections not obviously differentiated from the tail. This naming scheme suggests, rightly, that high Character values introduce more pronounced modulation into the reverb, but there’s a whole lot more going on, too. Take, for example, the Character parameter, which runs from ‘Clean’ at one end of its travel to ‘Chorus’ at the other extreme, with the mid-point labelled ‘Lively’. This is partly because FabFilter have found ways to make one or two controls do the work of many. Its design does not draw any obvious cues from reverbs of the past and despite having only six main controls, it is capable of producing a remarkable variety of different sounds. No surprise, then, that neither of these is true of FabFilter’s Pro-R, which is available in all major native formats and authorised using a simple copy-and-paste key.
In the design of reverb plug-ins, typically there’s also a fairly direct link between how flexible a reverb is and how many controls you have to figure out. Many of the reverb plug-ins I’ve come across lately are either based to some degree on old designs from the likes of Lexicon, or are convolution plug-ins, stocked with impulse responses based on old designs from the likes of Lexicon. The latest studio staple to undergo a FabFilter makeover is one where fresh thinking isn’t always as abundant as you might expect. All sorts of features are implemented that wouldn’t be possible in the analogue domain, yet the control arrangements are intuitive and straightforward. What’s particularly impressive about plug-ins such as the Pro-Q 2 equaliser, Pro-C 2 compressor and Pro-MB multiband processor is the balance they strike between ease of use and versatility. Everything is tailored for mouse control, with beautifully thought-out graphical displays that offer informative feedback.
#Fabfilter timeless 3 gearspace software
Rather than mimicking the look and feel of vintage hardware, FabFilter’s philosophy is to embrace the new possibilities that software design opens up. Since then, the Amsterdam-based developers have forged an individual and very effective approach to user-interface design, and have been applying this to the core tools that mix engineers need every day. It’s more than a decade since FabFilter first grabbed the attention of the music-production world, through the innovative means of designing software filters that actually sounded good. FabFilter claim that their Pro-R combines both virtues. Typically, reverb plug-ins are either simple or versatile.
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