Silencer Review: Saying Goodbye to Reverb Buildup

It goes without saying that reverb is one of the most essential tools in the music maker’s kit. From putting sounds in space, creating more interest in sound, to creating lush ambient textures, the list of creative ways to use reverb is limited only by imagination. When it comes to mixing, reverb can sometimes be the problem child, getting in the way and messing up a clear stage.

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There are some time-tested methods (gating, EQ, and compression) that have helped solve this problem to some extent over the years. But they can sometimes introduce unwanted artifacts, leaving you wishing for a better solution.

This is where Silencer, a new plugin by Wide Blue Sound (see our previous Elysium and Eclipse reviews, and make sure to check out their recent and free Audio Plugin Uninstaller), hopes to offer a fresh approach for controlling reverb in a mix, while also offering new ways to get creative with glorious reverb tools. Did Wide Blue Sound deliver? Let’s find out in our Silencer review…

Not A Reverb! – Embracing Creative Freedom

Silencer is not in itself a reverb – it creates no sound within its own algorithms. Silencer uses the reverb plugins you already own. This has the advantage of adopting sounds and timbres that your ears are already very used to – removing the learning curve of using the reverb itself.

The core innovation of Silencer lies in its Timegate technology. It totally resets the reverb with each incoming trigger, ensuring a clean and defined sound even with heavy reverbs applied. This eliminates the unwanted buildup that often plagues mixes, leaving you with pristine sonic clarity. There are reverbs out there that have sidechain ducking built-in – Fabfilter’s R2 and Cableguys Reverb Shaper being my go-to’s. But the timegate algorithm is slightly different in that it restarts the reverb completely with each hit. Reverbs change their timbre and characteristics in time by default. So the initial sound of a reverb will differ from later in the tail. It’s this aspect that is really interesting in the Silencer plugin.

The learning curve is not crazy steep, but is definitely more than most plugins. Having said that, the level of hand-holding through the initialization process is very clear and helpful: When you initialize the plugin, you have to allow it to scan your library, and then you have to go through and select the relevant plugins for use (you can use other FX beyond reverb – more on that in a bit) – but the plugin is very clear about where to go and what to click to make that process as pain-free as possible.

Once the initializing process is complete, you place the Silencer plugin on the track you want to affect, select the reverb you want to use, and Silencer acts as a container for the reverb. From there, you can manipulate several aspects of the reverb to help it accomplish what you want in the track. Press play, and the transient volume of the audio triggers the timegate algorithm in Silencer to reset the reverb. You can adjust the sensitivity of the audio trigger with the trig knob on the side of the GUI – this makes the envelope more or less sensitive to the incoming signal, so you can control what elements of the signal cause the reverb to reset.

There’s also a hold function to the trigger envelope – the shorter the hold, the quicker the timegate function will retrigger. If the hold is longer, then more audio will pass through before it retriggers. If you wanted reverb to hang around over a drum fill, for example, and not re-trigger with every hit, then you can lengthen the hold. There are further, more advanced controls for the control envelope, with hysteresis and filters for the audio trigger – so you could trigger from just the higher or lower frequencies of the incoming audio (think reverb triggered by kick but not snare, or vice versa, for example).

If you’re not happy with that reverb, it’s a simple button press to swap to another one from the list. I found the audio trigger to be extremely efficient when it came to clear transient-heavy material, such as drums, percussion, or arpeggiated sounds with clear attacks. It was interesting, but less predictable when used with more textural or softer attacked sounds, which is to be expected. This is why they offer a MIDI trigger option also.

Clicking the MIDI button removes the audio trigger options, and now Silencer listens to incoming MIDI signal in order to reset the reverbs. It can either be directly from the instrument track it’s on – every note of MIDI played will re-trigger Silencer, or if you want more granular control away from the MIDI instrument, you can send a separate MIDI channel into Silencer with whatever trigger timings you want on that channel. I found this super useful for triggering reverbs when it wasn’t clear where the transients were, or when the reverb was supposed to re-trigger.

There is both a reverb level and mix amount – Silencer disables the dry/wet and level functions of the original reverb. I found the disable button useful – it takes Silencer out of the chain, but leaves the reverb contained within it. So you can hear the difference between the original reverb and reverb affected by Silencer’s algorithms.

Additional Features

Once you have the trigger functionality working as you want, there is an FX chain you can add to within the plugin, with 8 slots for additional processing. Silencer has 3 of its own built-in effects, plus you can add your own VSTs within that chain.

Silencer doesn’t stop at just introducing the groundbreaking Timegate technology. It comes equipped with a plethora of additional features that further enhance your control and creativity:

The Silencer effects are specifically tuned for reverb. While working on this Silencer review, I particularly liked the Focus EQ: a one-band EQ that emphasizes the dry signal and de-emphasizes the wet signal in a particular frequency band. You can adjust how much dry signal is boosted, and how much wet is removed, and the Q of the EQ. If you want more than one band, you can just add another Focus EQ. This is great if you want a particular area of the sound you’re affecting to stick through a bit more.

I also liked the Spread function on the Strip effect. It quickly pans the dry and wet signals in opposite directions, in extreme being dry panned hard one way, and wet the other. This is a really quick way to create a lot of space in the sound.

Your own VSTs that you add to Silencer will only affect the reverb, not the dry signal. So the effects chain adds a layer of efficiency, saving you a ton of automation time, by having it all in one place. If you get to a spot where you’re loving the effects chain on your reverb, you can save it as a preset for use on other reverbs in other projects. Very useful!

Trying to Break the Plugin

So you can use Silencer as a reverb plugin, but can you use it to control other sound processing tools? I thought I’d give it a try. I shoved a bunch of different plugins moonlighting as “reverbs” into the plugin to see how the retrigger function would work. It was interesting – stuff that I could get to feedback crazily would be really cool as it totally reset the feedback and started the process again. If I combined the plugin with Silencer’s sidechain plugin, I could get the processing to fade in after each trigger, which was fun. So I put a very resonant phaser on some drums and got them to fade in with every snare hit, so the phasing sound gradually faded in, in a rhythmic pulse.

Silencer Review – Final Thoughts

Silencer is a great plugin. It does what it says on the tin very effectively. I found it the most useful in electronic style music, and for creative sound design options in processing sound. I found that it would very quickly become an obvious process – the reverb resetting would make the sound stick out somewhat, even when using it subtly. So for putting a sound in a particular space on the sound stage, I didn’t think it worked very well. But for pop and electronic music, where you need to have the reverb thicken up the sound, but at the same time get out of the way of other sounds in the mix, I found it absolutely excellent.

It’s cleaner sounding than other ducking plugins – no mess in the mix. You could add thickness to synth or vocal, or big reverb to drums, but it would add to the tonality and not clutter up the sound. I particularly loved it as a rhythmic sound design plugin. Adding texture to sounds that fluctuated and pumped with the tempo (or not!) but was controllable, and didn’t require a ton of automation, I found really inspiring. With some experimentation, I got some cool results using tools that weren’t reverb also. Although obviously stuff with tails are the clearest use cases.

To learn more on Silencer please visit the official web page.
Introductory sale of $79, $99 regularly. A demo version is available and Wide Blue Audio offers a generous and easy 14-day money-back guarantee.