Earlier in the week, a new plugin was introduced to the music producer community by indie developer Variety of Sound.
epicCLOUDS is a free ambient reverb unit that specializes in creating long and spacious reverb effects.
It has a fairly simplistic approach with a couple of interesting features to look at.
The first is Bloom. This advanced FX module functions as a time-warping envelope shaper, controlling the smoothness (or sharpness) of the source sound and essentially the speed of the attack. It works by defining a percentage value that ranges from 0% to 100%, with the lowest value being a sharp attack and the highest value more soft and gradual.
The way this parameter affects the sound is that it manipulates the incoming audio with this sort of granural timestretch effect that works in conjunction with the Decay parameter which is on the other side. The Decay parameter defines the length or the duration of the reverb tail. Time can be set up to 60000 milliseconds (1 minute), with the lowest possible value being 1000 ms (1 second).
When set to the minimum value, it is possible to achieve some more mild reverb effects that simulate large rooms, studios or small concert halls. So regardless of its ambient focused approach, it is still a pretty versatile VST FX.
The spectrum-based audio visualizer will help you analyze the full stereo image and see how the different parameters affect the audio in real time.
The remaining on-board parameters are Mod (modulation) and Tone (frequency filter). On the bottom of the interface there are also two tiny switches. One sets the quality of the effect using two available options – High Quality for best performance and Economy for lower CPU usage. The other switch seems to apply a short pre-delay when triggered.
epicCLOUDS seems like a very straight-forward kind of reverb, and despite (or actually thanks to) its simplified visual presentation it does seem like a very handy reverb with interesting capabilities.
Variety of Sound himself is a computer scientist and musician. He has released a bunch of freebies in the past which are mostly VST audio effects and various plugin utilities.
epicCLOUDS is available for Windows (32-bit/64-bit) and comes in both VST2 and VST3 dedicated plugins.
