We’ve just released ValhallaSupermassive 4.0.0, featuring the new Pleiades reverb/echo mode. We’re really excited about this new mode, so let’s get straight to it!
Pleiades: The BEST Reverb In Supermassive
Pleiades isn’t one of the “weirdo” Supermassive modes. Instead, it is designed to make the smoothest, most natural reverbs yet found in Supermassive. Pleiades has a very fast attack, and a filtered exponential decay. 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.
- Pleiades can be used to create realistic small room sounds with shorter delays and lower feedback values
- Turn up the feedback, and you get a lush reverb with a natural high frequency decay (depending on the EQ settings).
- The modulation is rich and balanced, which makes Pleiades ideal for huge modulated reverbs, as well as chorus/flangers and chorused synced echoes.
Plenty O’ Pleiades Presets
Check out the LATE 2024 presets for some good examples of what Pleiades can do. The presets range from lush choruses and metallic flangers, to smooth chorused echoes, to grainy huge reverbs, and finally to beautiful modulated reverbs with high echo density and a natural open decay.
Listen to Pleiades in action
Here’s a quick demo of the Pleiades mode, used on guitar and bass. The rhythm guitar is running through a Pleiades reverb preset, the lead guitar is sent through the Pleiades Run Like Heck preset, and the bass is using the Pleiades 4 voice chorus preset:
Why is the Pleiades mode free?
ValhallaSupermassive started out as a collection of weird algorithms, that were interesting from a technical perspective, but not necessarily useful as standard reverbs. To be perfectly honest, the early Supermassive algorithms seemed promising, but we weren’t sure how to “tame” them, so we let the results be as unruly as they wanted to be. Over the past few years, we’ve released several Supermassive updates that add more and more “musical” algorithms. The Scorpio, Libra and Leo algorithms stand up with anything we’ve released in our paid plugins. The Pleiades algorithm steps up the game even more, in terms of transparency, natural decay, and musicality. We’ve asked ourselves: Should this be in a free plugin?
The answer, of course, is YES. 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!
Supermassive 4.0.0: Still FREE!
As always, Valhalla Supermassive is a FREE plugin, available for both Windows and Intel/M1/M2/M3/M4 Macs. Just head on over to the Supermassive page, or go over to our Demos & Downloads page and grab all of our free plugins, as well as demos for the commercial ones.
We hope you enjoy the ValhallaSupermassive 4.0.0 update and thanks for your support!
