Polo

Polo: a musical reverb management plugin.

Reverb is what can really set the great mixing engineers apart from the rest. It can take a lot of work to set up convincing spaces. Polo is my attempt to bring some secret sauce to your reverb game. It's an audiobridge (like DeepPerfection) based plugin where reverb is shared amongst tracks BUT each track can be set accordingly for ducking, pre delay and position.

Polo Sum is one reverb instance (Room, Plate, Hall, or Reflections) living on a single return track. Polo Send is a featherweight tap you drop on every source track. Each Send doesn't carry its own reverb; it just tells the Sum one thing: how far this send sits into the shared room. Drag a dot on the Send's pad (near/far, left/right) and that track's amount of pre-delay, stereo image, and damping is set automatically from its distance.

This isn't a soundstage placement tool, that's a job for Polo's sibling, Marco. Polo is about the reverb itself: one musical, well-behaved space that every track can lean into, with per-track control over how much of that space each one gets.

I was striving for realism with Marco, with Polo this is the reverb I want when I'm mixing a dense track from start to finish.

What's inside:

• Four spaces. Room, Plate, Hall, Reflections.
• Distance-based sends. Every Send publishes a 0 to 100% distance into the room; the Sum derives pre-delay, stereo image, and damping per source, live, so you're managing reverb amount and character rather than mixing wet levels by ear.
• Tilt L/R. A small per-send offset shifts that track's reflection timing left or right, giving the tail its own stereo shape without touching the dry signal.
• Max Pre-Delay sets the room size. One knob on the Sum sets the physical depth of the whole space (with a live feet readout), and every Send's Distance maps into it.
• Per-track Duck. Each Send can duck the shared tail when its source gets loud, so the busiest track doesn't drown the room. Because it's one shared reverb, the strongest active Send governs the space, so the whole room ducks together, naturally.
• Built for real sessions. Send is tiny and glanceable, meant to live on up to 15 tracks at once; Sum is the one hero window where you actually design the room.
• VST3 / AAX / AU / CLAP, Windows & Mac.

Demos available at BruceJames.Studio