Eventide already has many fantastic sounding reverbs. 2016 Stereo Room, Blackhole, TVerb, MangledVerb, SP2016 Reverb (my personal favourite), UltraReverb, and Spring. So why another?
Believe it or not, ShimmerVerb does fill a sound design purpose missing in all their other reverbs. The most critical part of reverbs, in general, are the tails. Sure, it’s great to control early reflections, input filtering, attack, pre-delay, and other associated parameters. But it is the tail that gives a reverb its character. And in the case of ShimmerVerb, it is all about the tail. A beautiful dense, elaborate, pitch-shifted tail.
If you’re looking for a general all-purpose traditional reverb for vocals and other instruments to use in a mix, step aside, move right along. Many of the other Eventide reverb offerings are much better suited to that task. ShimmerVerb is a sound design feedback based reverb tool featuring parallel pitch shifters.
After setting initial reverb decay and size values, the signal runs through a delay before being fed into the two pitch-shifting algorithms. The pitch shifters are “tuned” to jump to perfect intervals of the source signal. We get a perfect fourth, fifth, and octave, above and below the original pitches.
The pitch shift knobs allow for detuning around these intervals, but the results are such that the harmonics generated are always tonal and consonant.
A feedback knob (with a three-way crossover controlling how much of each range goes into the feedback loop) sends the pitch-shifted reverb output back into the reverb input. So, this isn’t about metallic robotic alien-sounding special effects.
ShimmerVerb is about generating a beautifully modulated lustrous evolving tail that not only adds character to the sound; it actually becomes the sound. Just about anything fed in can become a rich, thick evolving pad of shifting harmonics. The delay into the feedback engine (either tempo-synced or free) introduces a rhythmic component that adds another layer of complexity to the sound.
The Eventide Ribbon controller is of particular interest with ShimmerVerb. Modulating the feedback amount and pith shifting values generates an evolving tail after the initial reverb “bloom.”
Two unique performance modes add further range to the sound design. Pitch Kill locks out the pitch shifters but feeds the reverb. This allows you to freeze ShimmerVerb’s pitch climb at sonically important moments.
The Freeze function locks out the pitch shifters and freezes the reverb. So you can, for example, freeze a complex tail to create a textural bed for dry soloing on top.
I haven’t tried the two together yet, but this seems like a natural fit with Eventide’s recently released Crystals. Sound design has never been so fun and easy thanks to this new range of Eventide products.