Sunset Sound Studio Reverb II: Put Your Music in a Legendary Studio

There are plenty of plugins that can give you a room, chamber, plate, or spring reverb. Sunset Sound Studio Reverb II takes a slightly different approach. Instead of recreating the general sound of a recording space, IK Multimedia captured the actual rooms and reverb equipment inside the legendary Sunset Sound studios.

With Version II, they’ve pushed things further, giving music producers more control over the positioning of sounds and how those rooms react around them.

What’s Inside The Plugin

Sunset Sound Studio Reverb II recreates Studios 1, 2, and 3 at Sunset Sound, along with their live rooms, isolation booths, echo chambers, EMT 140 plate, Echoplate, and AKG BX-20E spring reverb.

That gives us several different kinds of ambience to work with inside one plugin.

You can take a dry virtual instrument, guitar, drum machine, sample, or other recording and give it the reflections and perspective of an actual recording environment.

That’s especially useful for music producers working primarily inside a DAW, where many of the sounds we use may have very little natural ambience to begin with.

Instead of being limited to one type of reverb, you have the option to move between studios, chambers, plates, and spring reverbs depending on what the track needs.

More Than Another Reverb

The original Sunset Sound Studio Reverb already offered recreations of the studio’s famous spaces. Version II dramatically increases how much control producers have over them.

IK now provides up to 27 individually captured source locations inside each studio, along with 336 stereo impulse responses from the live rooms.

According to IK, those positions were individually captured rather than created by interpolating between a smaller number of measurements.

So, instead of choosing Studio 1 and calling it done, you can decide where your sound is sitting inside Studio 1.You’re getting more control over the relationship between the source and the environment itself.

Actually Moving Through The Room

This is probably the feature that caught my attention the most.

The interface lets you change the source position inside the live room. Moving that position changes things such as early reflections, boundary reinforcement, and the overall perspective of the sound.

Think about recording drums in a real studio.

Putting the kit in the center of the room isn’t necessarily going to give you the same character as setting it closer to a wall or moving it farther away from the room microphones.

Now take that same idea and apply it to sampled drums, a piano library, or a dry guitar recording.

That’s a different way of approaching reverb, and one that feels much closer to making decisions in an actual recording room.

2 Reverbs In One Plugin

This is a beautiful thing because you can use two independent reverb engines running in parallel.

You could use a live room in one engine and an EMT plate in the second. Put a tighter room around your drums, then blend in a plate for additional length.

Or combine a live room with one of the studio chambers.

Each engine gets independent controls for EQ, level, width, pan, mic selection, decay, pre-delay, and other settings before the two are combined into the wet signal.

Normally, I would approach something like that with two separate auxiliary sends and two reverb plugins.

There’s nothing wrong with doing it that way, but having both spaces available inside one plugin makes experimenting with combinations easier.

Shaping The Studio Space

You’re not completely locked into the dimensions of the original rooms either.

The Size control can scale the captured space from 0% up to 200%. IK designed this to change the apparent size and decay while retaining the basic tonal and spatial characteristics of the original capture.

Studios 1 and 3 also include 3 dampening states that recreate the effect of movable absorption panels.

You can make the reflections brighter and livelier or progressively tighten them up. There are also directional and omnidirectional source settings. Use directional for guitar cabinets and brass, and omni mode for drums, piano, and ensembles.

You can even switch between modeled API/DeMedio and Neve style preamp signal paths for some additional character.

Where This Reverb Works

I like to start with drums, especially sampled drums that feel a little too dry or separated from the rest of the track.

I’d usually load one of the live rooms, keep the Size somewhere around 70–90%, and start moving the source around until the drums pick up enough room without sounding washed out. I’d keep the decay fairly short and blend in just enough wet signal to hear the space around the kit.

Brass is another place I’d experiment.

For a short horn section or brass stab, I’d try directional mode, move the source slightly deeper into the room, and keep the reverb fairly tight. I’d want the horns to feel like they were played in a physical room instead of coming straight out of a sampler.

I’d also try it on warm synth pads. I might push the Size above 100%, darken some of the high end with the reverb EQ, and use a little more decay to move the pad farther behind the main elements.

For a short analog style synth pluck, I’d do almost the opposite: smaller room, shorter decay, and a lower wet level.

Who This Plugin Suits

Sunset Sound Studio Reverb II is for anyone wanting realistic room sounds and more control than a typical convolution reverb gives you.

It also makes sense if you like treating reverb as part of the recording rather than something you simply add at the end of a mix. If your main goal is enormous artificial ambient washes, extreme modulation, or experimental effects, this probably wouldn’t be my first choice.

Sunset Sound II feels much more at home when you want believable depth, placement, and studio character.

Is Sunset Sound II Worth It?

The famous studio name will obviously get people’s attention, but I don’t think that’s the most interesting part of Sunset Sound Studio Reverb II.

For me, it’s the ability to approach reverb more like I would approach recording in an actual room. Instead of simply deciding how much reverb a sound needs, I can think about where I want that instrument to sit and what kind of environment I want around it.

That’s especially appealing for producers doing most of their work inside a computer.

We may never track drums inside Sunset Sound Studio II, but plugins like this give us another way to bring some of that recording-room thinking into our own productions.

Don’t just add reverb. Put the track somewhere.