Loading…
The first release of Vellum Pro.
Vellum Pro is a reverb built around one idea: a reverb should get out of the way of the thing it is decorating, without getting smaller or shorter to do it. It is a separate, paid plugin — the free Vellum stays exactly as it is, tuned for voices. Pro is Vellum for everything else.
Most reverbs with a ducking control turn the whole tail down whenever the source is playing, then let it swell back. That works, and it costs you the reverb.
Vellum Pro measures, many times a second, which parts of the frequency range the source is actually covering up — and turns the tail down only there. The reverb stays as long, as wide and as bright as you set it, and simply steps aside in the narrow places where it was competing. On a real vocal, this keeps noticeably more clarity than ordinary ducking at the same tail level, and the difference gets larger the harder you duck.
It also tells the difference between a consonant and a loud vowel. Plosives and sibilance get a faster recovery than sustained notes do, so words stay crisp without the reverb pumping behind the whole performance.
A display shows you exactly what is being ducked and where, in real time.
Instead of one damping knob, you can draw how long the reverb rings at each frequency and the engine fits itself to what you drew. A dark hall that keeps its low end, a bright plate that dies quickly up top, a deliberately unnatural shape — all reachable, and the display shows you the decay you actually got over the one you asked for, so you can see where the engine ran out of range.
Vellum Pro carries seven voicings — voice, drums, bass and low, guitar and keys, strings and orchestral, bus and glue, and a design mode with every limit lifted. They are not seven names for one reverb: each remaps what the main controls mean, so the same knob positions land somewhere genuinely different. There is an automatic mode that listens and suggests one; it never switches for you.
Point Vellum Pro at an impulse response — a recording of a real hall, chamber or plate — and it measures the decay, the predelay and the early reflections, then sets itself to the closest match it can reach and tells you how close that is. If the file is something this reverb structurally cannot be, it says so and changes nothing, rather than quietly giving you a bad approximation.
It is a starting point, not a copy. Vellum Pro is an algorithmic reverb, not a convolver, and it will not reproduce every detail of a specific room — the top end in particular is an approximation. What it will do is put you in the right space in a couple of seconds, with every control still live.
Drag the bottom-right corner to make Vellum Pro as large or as small as you like. The size is saved with your project, and the last size you chose becomes the default for new instances. It opens at a compact size, with the advanced panel closed. The advanced panel opens to the right of the main controls, so the window never grows taller than it already is.
The light/dark button shows the finish you are in — a sun on brushed aluminium, a moon on graphite — and the preset library, the signal-flow view and the About card are framed so they read clearly on the dark finish too. In the demo, the trial bar has its own strip above the interface rather than sitting over it.
On the aluminium finish the signal-flow view lightens the panel behind it to near-white instead of darkening it, so the view stands out against a faint ghost of the controls; the graphite finish keeps the dimming. Clicking the Vellum Pro mark opens the About card. The preset manager's search and name fields are legible on both finishes, and every drop-down menu is drawn in the plugin's own style.