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Our all-time favourite free plugin just got another major update – are you downloading it right now?

When it comes to reverb and delay, developer Valhalla DSP is up there with the best in the game. You’ll find its VintageVerb and ValhallaDelay plugins on the hard drives of countless pro producers, and at $50 a pop they’re something of a bargain as well.

Valhalla’s greatest contribution to the music making world however, is its brilliant free plugin Supermassive. Now, as has become something of a pre-Black Friday tradition, that effect has been updated, hitting version 4.0 and adding a new reverb/echo algorithm named Pleiades.

First launched in 2020, Supermassive is a reverb/delay plugin that specialises in unusual and unnatural ambiences. The majority of its 21 reverb modes are designed to create extremely long and high-density feedback lines, which can create ethereal washes of ambience and long, swelling delay lines. (Pro tip: feed any sound source into its Planetarium preset to create instant ambient drones.)

Version 4.0 is something of a change of tack though. Whereas previous versions have specialised in reverb effects that are unnatural sounding by design, the Pleiades algorithm is tailored to more natural sounding ambient effects.

“Pleiades has a very fast attack, and a filtered exponential decay,” Valhalla explains. “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.”

While it’s just one more mode to add alongside 20 others, Pleiades is significant in that it has the potential to further expand Supermassive’s usefulness beyond its remit as a go-to creative effect into more functional mixing territory. Given that flexibility, you might wonder why it’s still free.

“ValhallaSupermassive started out as a collection of weird algorithms that were interesting from a technical perspective, but not necessarily useful as standard reverbs,” the developer explains. “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!”

Hear the new sounds in action via the demos below:

If you’ve made it this far without already heading over to the Valhalla site to download Supermassive 4.0, we highly recommend you do that now. It’s available for both Windows and Intel/M1/M2/M3/M4 Macs.

Black Friday is upon us, as developers scramble to get you on their mailing lists with the tempting offer of free music-making software. Not a bad deal – as long as you’re okay with an increasingly inflated inbox.

The latest developer to offer up a free plugin in exchange for your email address is Wave Alchemy, who has lovingly recreated the lauded (and eye-wateringly expensive) Bricasti M7 reverb in plugin form, delivering an impressive emulation that you can access entirely free of charge.

Magic7 takes its inspiration from the Bricasti Design Model 7, a $4,000 rackmount reverb that sounds fantastic, but likely sits well outside of the price range of most bedroom producers. Fortunately for us, Wave Alchemy has recreated each of the M7’s 234 presets, from spacious cathedrals to snappy room tones and everything in between.

Magic7 features 11 reverb types, covering Ambience, Chambers, Halls, Plates, Rooms, Spaces and Nonlinear, and the plugin is kitted out with a tempo-synced pre-delay control, along with two adjustable EQ bands. There’s also two types of modulation on offer: Flux introduces stereo spatialization for a subtle sense of movement, while Ensemble applies a richer and more dramatic chorus effect.

In addition, Magic7’s Smooth control will help to tame wayward transients to keep your reverb tails sounding lush, while the Duck slider will stop those tails from interfering with dry elements of your mix.

Magic7 is available now for free to download at the Wave Alchemy website.

Budget-conscious musicians and producers, prepare yourselves: Black Friday is almost upon us. It’s the most wonderful time of year to bag a freebie. And if you’re in the market for a shiny new addition to your studio, Cyber Weekend is the time to buy it. Synths, samplers, guitars, audio interfaces, you name it – if you can use it to make music, it’s probably discounted somewhere.

It’s not only hardware that’s on offer this Cyber Weekend, there are some fantastic Black Friday plugin deals already popping up across the internet.

You know what’s better than a discounted plugin, though? A free plugin. Nobody knows this better than plugin developer Waves, who are celebrating Cyber Weekend with the release of a mysterious freebie, to be revealed on November 29th, AKA Black Friday.

While Waves are remaining tight-lipped on any details, one thing’s for sure: it’s bound to be worth a download, as previous Cyber Weekends have seen Waves drop a variety of freebies that has included lo-fi reverbs, vocal processors and delay plugins endorsed by none other than renowned mix engineer Chris Lord-Alge – seek out those plugins now and you’ll pay through the nose for them, so our advice is to strike while the iron’s hot free.

If you want to secure your copy of Waves’ free plugin this Black Friday, all you need to do is visit their website and sign up to their mailing list. You’ll then be first in line to download the plugin once it’s available.

If you’re a fan of Waves products, then you might also want to take advantage of the brand’s early-bird Black Friday sale, which features a variety of unmissable discounts across many of the best Waves plugins, starting from only $19.99.