HOFA Plugins asked me if I could make a video walking you all through their new reverb plug-in. And while I was doing that, writing the video script, recording, editing and such, they also requested I’d make some presets.

Since one of the new features of this plug-in is support for surround use, and I myself am not really firm in surround production, we had to find an expert that could help us with that. That expert turned out to be Bart Jilesen, who my former tutor Danny Weijermans recommended. While Bart was already busy with the reverb, I was still busy equipping the studio with some rear speakers (a pair of trusty Genelecs). There are a couple of strategies approaching surround reverb.

For one, you could send a mono channel into a surround reverb. An exemplary use case would be post-production of a movie, where you’d want to add some room to your dialogue. This requires the use of multiple engines within IQ Reverb v2, as it offers 4 IR engines that can work in (up to) true stereo. Most of the time, you’ll want to use one engine for your front speakers, and a slightly altered version in a second engine that feeds to your rear speakers. “Slightly altered” can be achieved by such things as a little more pre-delay, an altered frequency response, or even a completely different impulse response.

For some more insight on this plug-in, check out this livestream I did at HOFA. In this, I show you a couple of presets and explain how I use this reverb in my daily production workflow: