Grand cathedrals and dampened rooms, underground tunnels and drum booths – you can put your music anywhere you want, but some plugins offer better sounding places than others. So, how do you choose the best?

These are the top 5 reverb plugins available in 2024:

1: Strymon BigSky – $198 (bEST fOR mUSICIANS)

If you’ve done any research into pedals, you’ve heard of the Strymon BigSky. From megachurches to dive bars, the pedal is the industry standard for massive reverb sounds. The pedal has been around for 10 years, but due to its popularity, Strymon has finally decided to make the excellent algorithms available in plugin format.

There are 12 Reverb Machines in total, including traditional sounding Room, Hall, and Plate settings alongside the more unique and beautiful sounding Bloom, Cloud and Shimmer. Some of these use a range of pitch shifting, and reverse techniques, making this a very creative and flexible reverb plugin. As you select each algorithm, you get access to its specific controls for further tweaking, which gives the plugin an advantage over the menu diving required on the pedal version. It also has Freeze and Hold functions that allow you to keep a sound going infinitely – which sounds gimmicky – it’s awesome.

This is our favorite reverb plugin.

2: FabFilter Pro-R 2 – $118 (bEST FOR pRODUCERS)

Pro-R 2 marks the evolution of FabFilter’s beloved reverb plugin, expanding upon its predecessor with a host of new features and enhancements. Retaining its signature user-friendly interface, Pro-R 2 offers intuitive controls including Distance, Brightness, and Space, ensuring effortless manipulation of your reverberation environment.

In addition to the familiar Modern style, Pro-R 2 introduces Vintage and Plate algorithms, broadening its sonic palette to cater to a wider range of artistic preferences. The inclusion of a Decay Rate EQ empowers users to finely adjust decay times across the frequency spectrum, providing unprecedented control over the reverberation’s tonal characteristics.

New to this version are innovative features such as Thickness control for enriching and shaping the reverb tail, alongside built-in Ducking and Auto-Gate functionalities for dynamic sculpting of the reverb’s behavior. A Freeze button allows for instant capture of frozen reverb textures, while support for surround and Immersive Audio formats ensures compatibility with modern production workflows.

3: BabyAudio Crystalline – $99 (mOST uNIQUE)

Unconventional look, great sound. The Baby Audio team has built a modern plugin that lets you control the size and reflection characteristics of its algorithm, rather than choosing between a small room or a hall.

You use icon-like graphics to tweak each control in sections called Reflections, Depth, Clean-up and Shape, which allow you to change the room size, stereo spread, modulation amount, reflection density, overall tone and more. There’s also a useful transient processor for controlling the attack and sustain portions of the reverb sound, a built-in ducker, and a freeze button.

Instead of pre-delay and decay time, you choose a start and end point for your reverb sound, which can also be synced to your DAW to get note-length divisions. It sounds fantastic, but can be a little heavy on the CPU. Thankfully though there’s an eco mode that can help with this.

4: Denise Audio – Perfect Room – $59 (bEST eXTRA rEVERB)

Some room algorithms can tend to add metallic resonances that smother the original sound, but not so with Perfect Room. Denise Audio uses something they call TXVerb reverb technology to enhance the inherent character and colouration of your signal, without cluttering it with unwanted resonances and tinny artefacts. This means you can use it on lead instruments, bass guitars and kick drums, or even busses and whole mixes, as it avoids adding harshness.

It can also be used to turn mono instruments into expansive environments without any phase issues and comes with five different room types, and three tail shape options. There’s also a built-in ducker (which you can probably tell by this point is a must for a modern reverb plugin!), plus Shimmer and Detune parameters, making Perfect Room capable of more traditional spaces and extreme sound-designed effects.

5: Valhalla Vintage Verb – $50 (bEST VALUE)

Tried and true – and as versatile as it gets. Every size space, from stadiums to recording booths, is crafted with immaculate attention to detail and an astounding warmth. This plugin comes with 22 classic digital reverbs and 3 color modes inspired by the most beloved reverb hardware from the 1970s and 1980s. Concert Hall / Bright Hall / Plate / Room / Chamber / Random Space / Chorus Space / Ambience / Sanctuary / Dirty Hall / Dirty Plate / Smooth Plate / Smooth Room / Smooth Random / Nonlin / Chaotic Hall / Chaotic Chamber / Chaotic Neutral / Cathedral / Palace / Chamber1979 (new in 4.0.0) / Hall1984 (new in 4.0.0) It has just about every option you could want, and it’s probably been used on some of your favorite tracks. The best part is, it’s just $50