BLOOM - Designing a Reverb that Balances Ease and Versatility
Bloom was born from a simple question: how can we create a reverb that’s both easy to use and highly versatile?
Cascaded diffusion is known to naturally yield a buildup or rise time as a byproduct, this technique is sometimes employed to create reverse reverb effects. However, used in isolation, for classic room emulation, it is sometimes excessive, unrealistic, or overly metallic.
We made the decision In Bloom to fully embrace those characteristics by making them central to the design (hence the name), and employed techniques to tame excess resonances, allowing the tails to open up and come alive.
Given how well ADSR envelopes are understood from their common use in synthesizers, a reverb that utilized attack and decay in its impulse response instead of modulation envelopes seemed like a creative and enjoyable concept to explore. So with the aid of novel signal processing techniques we further developed this concept, incorporating parallel and serial modes to achieve an explicit rise time.
The sonic possibilities were then significantly broadened by the addition of tap modes. While realistic small room reproduction was not a primary goal for Bloom, we found that it proved remarkably effective in that area as well, yielding an even greater range of creative applications.