VerdaliScene

VerdaliScene aims to be a whole place in one plugin.

A stream running through a summer wood with birds in the canopy and bees along the bank. A shore in a thunderstorm. A fire burning down under the stars while an owl calls from the trees. It builds them out of every nature instrument in the Verdalis suite at once — rain, thunder, waves, wind, birds, rivers, fire, insects and the night — and like all of them it computes every sound while it plays, so a scene never loops and never repeats.

Each of those is a layer, and a layer is not an imitation of its instrument: it is the instrument. A rain layer has every one of RainyDay’s controls, its own panels in its own colour, and RainyDay’s whole preset library — your own presets included — and it saves back as a RainyDay preset. Add up to four layers of each kind, take any away, and balance them on a mixer with a strip for every layer: level, pan, a stereo or mono switch to place a single sound at one point, mute and solo.

Every mixer strip is a channel strip, too: the layer’s own envelope drawn as a curve with its attack, decay, sustain and release under it, and its filter. Hold a key and the whole scene fades in, each layer on its own envelope; let go and it fades out again. Every envelope’s stages can be bent — a fade-in that swells in late, a release that hangs on before it goes — by dragging the curve itself.

And every layer has effects of its own, as does the scene: a reverb made for long, smooth tails — up to two minutes, or frozen in place — with its own low and high cut; a delay with ping-pong, tempo sync and feedback that can run past 100 % into a held, saturating wall; and a chorus, flanger, phaser, stereo widener and auto-pan. Put the birds in a canyon and leave the wind outside it. When the key is let go, the tails either ring on by themselves after the scene has faded or fade out with it — one switch for the whole scene.

Its nineteen ready-made scenes, from Forest River and Stormy Shore to Frog Pond, Winter Cabin, Cave Mouth, Canyon Echo and Cuckoo Wood, were mixed by ear, layer by layer, in the plugin itself. It features an envelope over the whole scene that follows a held key, the host’s transport or nothing at all; a filter, highpass, width and output gain for the scene as a whole. Native CLAP and VST3 for Linux and Windows.