Eventide Temperance Pro

Temperance Lite (left) is free for a limited time, but the Pro version (right) offers much deeper control and more extreme effects should you want them.

Thought you knew reverb? Eventide’s unique new plug‑in might just make you think again...

Available in two versions, Lite and Pro, Eventide’s Temperance takes reverb plug‑in design in a new direction, not only allowing its simulations to emulate realistic spaces as you might expect, but also to function almost as part of an active, musical instrument. Traditional reverbs replicate how sound diffuses in air and bounces off walls, either by capturing IRs, or with synthetic reverb algorithms based on FIR filters (multi‑tapped delays), using a mixture of comb and all‑pass filters to recirculate the sound. By contrast, Temperance operates in what Eventide call “the modal domain”, where each space is represented by a very large number of differently tuned resonators. Eventide describe the process as the resonators behaving rather like tuning forks, each one tuned to a specific frequency. This suggests some parallels with Zynaptiq’s Adaptiverb, which creates the reverb tail using a large number of oscillators whose respective levels are influenced by the spectrum of the incoming sound.

Temperance Tour

All the controls present in the Lite version of Temperance are also present in the Pro version, so I’ll start off by describing the Lite version — at the time of writing this one is available for free — and then move on to the added extras of the Pro version. This plug‑in exhibits very low latency and combines the natural sound of modal modelling with intuitive controls that enable the user to easily explore its creative potential. Fifteen factory presets, including five tutorials, are included.

When an audio signal is fed into the plug‑in, it excites the resonant modes, just as it would in a real space, and each mode has its own resonant frequency, decay time, amplitude and phase. This is what creates the familiar wash of reverberation. But within Temperance, each resonator can be individually manipulated in real time — and to make possible musical treatments that stray well away from natural reverb, Eventide have tied this in with the 12‑note chromatic...