Foundwaves Verb Designer

What Foundwaves Verb Designer is for

Foundwaves is a convolution reverb designed around one idea: the impulse response is a real, captured space — a hallway, a stairwell, a stone room — not a synthetic algorithm, and the plugin's job is to let you shape that space without ever losing what makes it a real place. Every module can be switched fully off, and the dry signal is protected: at Mix 0 the output is bit-exact dry.

Impulse responses come from Foundwaves Capture (the companion iOS app) via automatic iCloud sync, or you can load your own third-party IRs into a separate custom library.

The IR library

Two library columns sit on the left: your captured spaces, synced automatically from Foundwaves Capture with zero setup, and a custom IR library for any bought or third-party impulse responses you drop in with ADD IR…. Select any pack to load it — the captured photo, where available, shows alongside its name.

Space

The core module. Size stretches the loaded IR longer or shorter, Reverse flips it, and Early / Late balances the split between the room's early reflections and its long tail. Attack and Decay reshape how the tail builds and falls away. These recompute the impulse response itself in the background, so they take a moment to update rather than reacting instantly — that's the cost of genuinely reshaping the captured IR rather than faking it with an envelope.

Motion

Move slowly morphs the tail between the loaded IR and a subtly detuned twin of itself, giving the space a slow, living movement instead of a perfectly static tail. At Move 0 (or with Motion switched off) you hear the captured space exactly as recorded — Move only introduces movement as you raise it, never a fixed colouration sitting underneath.

Shimmer

A pitch-shifted feedback loop feeding back into the reverb's own input — the classic ambient "shimmer" effect, built on top of your real captured space rather than a synthetic tail. The loop is bounded internally so it can't runaway regardless of how it's driven.

Room EQ & Colour

A five-band EQ (low shelf, three bells, high shelf) shapes the wet signal directly — drag a node on the graph for frequency and gain, scroll to adjust Q. It's deliberately knob-free and visual, the fastest way to tune a room's tone by eye and ear together.

Colour adds drive and a tilt/damping character on top of the EQ for a warmer or brighter overall cast to the tail.

Dynamics

Compression and ducking on the wet signal only — compression adds density and sustain to the tail, and ducking pulls the tail back under the dry signal's own transients so the reverb never buries a hit.

Output & Mix

Mix has two modes:

• Add (default) — the dry signal passes at exact unity gain at every Mix setting; the room is purely added on top. This is the setting to use as an insert — it can never quietly thin out your dry transients as you raise Mix.
• Blend — the classic crossfade between dry and wet, the only mode that reaches 100% wet. Use this on an aux/return track.

Width controls the stereo image of the wet signal independently of the dry.

Undo & A/B compare

Specifications

Troubleshooting

Changing Size or Decay doesn't update immediately

Expected — those controls recompute the impulse response itself in the background rather than applying an instant envelope, so there's a short delay before the change is audible.

My drum bus lost punch after adding reverb

Check Mix mode is set to Add, not Blend — Blend crossfades the dry down as you raise Mix, which can measurably reduce transient peak on percussive material. Add keeps the dry at exact unity regardless of Mix.

I don't see my captured spaces in the library

Confirm Foundwaves Capture has iCloud sync enabled and has actually saved the capture — packs sync automatically with no manual export step required once that's set up.

The tail sounds like a comb filter or slightly phasey

Check Motion's Move control isn't parked partway up unintentionally — at Move 0 with Motion off you should hear the captured space exactly as recorded.