OTO BAM: The most polite, agreeable, and traditionally beautiful (“cinematic”) reverb I use. It has a sort of grey, clay-like texture, really smooth smearing, doesn’t impart too much of its own texture, blends well with the source material and sits nicely in a mix. Nice subtle tone-shaping facilities with the filters and gain controls, and the through mode is a nice tone-shaper. Overall, very well-behaved, though being able to play the size knob is a cool weirdness bonus.
Erbe Verb: Wild, a little angry but versatile. It wants to be guitar feedback and an atonal oscillator as much as a reverb. Very colorful, often a bit trashy (in a good way imo) - there is a harsh edge that you can dial away somewhat with the EQ but it’s always there. It can have an ocean/marine flavor at certain spots (with longer sizes) that can give a great lo-fi/retro flavor to e.g. pads, in the neighborhood of a spring reverb. But it’s most enjoyable when abused with CV modulation (hit it with those 10v envelopes).
Quadraverb: Very nice for pads, particularly the room and hall. Has a particular recognizable midrange response and pitch modulation that is a big part of the 90s WARP sound. Between BAM and Erbe Verb in terms of coloration, often just right. A couple of algorithms expose “diffusion” and “density” parameters which are very interesting to play with, especially with sparse percussion - it goes from unrealistic skeletal pings to empty swimming pool to massive painterly smears. Generous MIDI implementation for tweaking and surprisingly decent UI for being of the shameless LCD menu diving era (pressure-sensitive buttons help).
