Tool · Starveil
Hear what Starveil's decay controls do
A small listening panel for Starveil, our reverb. A dry snare and a piano phrase through three real Starveil settings, so you can hear decay shaped by frequency.
No. 07Starveil is the reverb in our Sonaurelis plugins. The idea behind it is that you get to choose how long different parts of the sound keep ringing. The lows can hang on while the highs fall away, or the other way round. That's easy to say and a lot easier to hear, so we made a little listening panel for its page.
What you can do with it
Pick a dry snare or a short piano phrase. Then switch between Dry and three Starveil settings: a close room, a dark long tail and a bright short tail. You can switch while it's playing and it keeps its place, so you're always comparing the same moment.
Next to the player is the decay picture. It shows how long each frequency keeps ringing after the sound stops, and it changes as you switch. In the dark setting the lows ring for about seven seconds and the highs for about a second and a half. In the bright setting the lows fade in less than a second, while the highs last about a second and a half.
How we made it
The reverb comes from the actual Starveil plugin, the 0.2.0 engineering-test build. We rendered the six processed examples offline on a Mac and kept a dry version of each source for comparison. Then we matched every version of each source to the same loudness, so it's easier to hear what the space is doing. The decay picture is measured from that same build, not drawn by hand.
The snare is from Frankensnare by Karoryfer Samples, which they've released into the public domain. The piano notes come from the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios, who share their instrument recordings for anyone to use. We wrote the piano phrase ourselves.
Starveil is still in private testing. If you'd like to hear when it's ready, the waitlist is right under the panel.
