TG Spaces

A convolution reverb for Windows with 112 places in it, and controls that a blind engineer can actually read.

Put it on a track, choose a space, and your sound is in that space. A bedroom, a cathedral, an open field, a drive-through speaker. Then move around inside it: walk to the back of the hall, make the room bigger, turn your head.

Hear it first — one piece of music through eight of these places, in your browser, nothing to install.

The rooms are built, not recorded

Reverbs of this kind normally ship recordings of real halls. This one ships a room-acoustics model — walls, materials, distances, the way air swallows the top end over a long throw — and builds each response as you ask for it.

That difference is the whole point. In a plugin full of recordings, "room size" stretches the recording and "distance" fades more of it in. Here, making the room bigger builds a bigger room, and walking away from the source moves you. The pre-delay, the balance of direct to reflected sound, the high end lost to the air and the width of the stereo image all change together, because all of them are consequences of standing somewhere else.

It also means every space in here is original work. Nothing is sampled, licensed, or borrowed from anybody.

What is in it

112 spaces, grouped so they are quick to move through by ear:

• Rooms — bedroom, kitchen, tiled bathroom, hallway, stairwell, basement, garage, empty apartment.
• Studio — vocal booth, drum room, live room, echo chamber, scoring stage.
• Venues — jazz club, small theatre, concert hall, opera house, stone church, cathedral, arena, stadium.
• Large indoor — gymnasium, swimming pool hall, train station, airport terminal, aircraft hangar, underground car park.
• Enclosed — car interior, bus, airplane cabin, elevator, phone booth, shipping container, cardboard box.
• Outdoor — open field, forest clearing, canyon, city street, narrow alley, courtyard, under a bridge, road tunnel.
• Through a speaker — a PA in a bar, a TV across the living room, a laptop speaker, an intercom, a drive-through, a megaphone, a telephone earpiece. These are not rooms around a sound. They are a device playing it, in a room, with the device's own response in the way.
• Unusual — cave, cistern, grain silo, bell tower, anechoic chamber.

A binaural mode. On headphones, with a modelled head: a source straight ahead sits centre, and turning the listener moves it around you with the real interaural timing and the real head shadow. Speakers mode uses a mono-safe stereo pair instead, so a mix made with it will not collapse when summed.

The parts that matter if you cannot see

Every control is a named parameter that speaks its value in words. In Reaper with OSARA, press P on the track and arrow through them:

Distance reports real metres for the room you are actually standing in, not a percentage you have to translate. Listener angle says "facing the source", because zero degrees means facing the source in all 112 rooms — a plugin whose angle control is measured from some arbitrary compass direction is a plugin you have to build a mental model of before you can use it.

All 112 spaces are exposed as presets, so they appear in Reaper's preset dropdown at the top of the plugin window and can be stepped through from there as well as from the parameter list.

There is no custom plugin window, and that is deliberate. A drawn interface would look better and work worse.

What it runs in

Built and tested in Reaper on 64-bit Windows. That is the honest scope of what has been verified.

It is a standard VST3, so it should load in any VST3 host on 64-bit Windows — Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig, Cakewalk, Waveform and others. It has not been tested in those, and how accessible it is depends heavily on the host: the plugin exposes named, readable parameters, but whether your screen reader reads them out is down to the DAW. Reaper with OSARA is where that works properly today.

Not yet available for Logic Pro or macOS. Logic loads Audio Units rather than VST3. The Audio Unit is written and needs building on a Mac; it is coming. Pro Tools would need AAX, which is further off.

Honest about the rough edge

This is version 0.9, not 1.0, and the reason is worth stating plainly.

Six controls automate smoothly and sample-accurately: Mix, Pre-delay, Width, Low cut, High cut and Output.

The five that shape the room — Space, Distance, Room size, Decay and Listener angle — are safe to automate but move in small crossfaded steps rather than gliding. Slow moves sound fine. A fast sweep steps audibly. That is a limit of how the plugin swaps responses, it is understood, and it is being worked on.

If you want a sound to travel across a room today, automating Mix against a fixed Distance gets most of the way there.

Download

Download TG Spaces 0.9 — Windows, VST3, 3.1 MB

Copy the TG Spaces.vst3 folder into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\, then in Reaper choose Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, VST, and Re-scan. To uninstall, delete that folder — there is no installer, no registry entries and nothing running in the background.

Free to use for anything you make, including commercial work, with no attribution and no royalties. Please send people here rather than passing the file on, so they get the updates.

If it earns its place in something you make, there is a tip jar — pay what you like, entirely optional, and nothing is held back from anyone who does not.

Support TG Studios

Telling me it is broken

Bug reports from screen reader users are the ones that actually improve this. If a value reads wrong, a control does nothing, or something crashes, I want to know.

Write to hello@tgstudios.app.