Product Reviews by KVR Members

Every few months a plugin shows up that's hard to file under an existing tab, and Reactive Audio's Wake is one of them. On paper it sounds like another audio-reactive effect. It detects transients in your audio and does something on each hit, and we've seen that before. But Wake isn't a shaper. It doesn't reshape the audio that's already there. It generates new sound that builds into every hit, and that one design choice makes it feel like a different category entirely.

The core idea
Drop Wake on a drum bus and play. For every transient it detects, it grows a swell that rises and resolves exactly on the hit, a kind of pre-echo. In Reverb mode that swell is a reverse-reverb of the hit. In Spectral mode it's resynthesized from the hit's own frequency content, which is where things get interesting. Because the swell is built from the sound that triggered it, it carries that timbre. A vocal blooms into a vocal-ish wash, a synth into a synth-ish riser, and it's all locked to the performance rather than a tempo grid.

It uses look-ahead to pull this off, so there's latency (your DAW compensates for it). That makes Wake firmly a mix-time tool rather than something for live monitoring, and the manual is upfront about it. Fair enough.

The 1.2 headline: MIDI-controlled harmony
The marquee addition in 1.2 is the one that made me sit up. In Spectral mode you can set Harmony to "Played (MIDI)", route a MIDI chord to the plugin, and the swells bloom into whatever you're holding. Hold a Cmaj and your hits harmonize to Cmaj. Move to Am and they follow. On a sustained vocal or a melodic plucked source it's genuinely lovely. You get these harmonized risers that move with the song, the kind of thing you'd normally automate by hand or layer in by ear. It turns an effect into something closer to a playable instrument.

On drums it's more of a coloration than a clean chord. Drums are mostly inharmonic, so you get a tuned, harmonic halo rather than a piano voicing. As an atmospheric riser under a build, it works a treat.

Niggles
A few. Routing MIDI to an audio-FX plugin is DAW-dependent. It's painless in Bitwig, Ableton, FL and Reaper, but fiddly in Logic, where AU effects don't take MIDI gracefully (a macOS limitation, not really Wake's fault, but worth knowing). The Windows build is brand-new this version and unsigned, so you'll click through a SmartScreen warning on install. And by nature this is a niche tool. It does one unusual thing extremely well rather than being a do-everything box, so whether it earns a slot in your chain depends on whether that thing speaks to you.

Verdict
At $20, Wake is an easy recommendation for anyone who likes sound design that reacts to the material instead of fighting it. Think film and trailer folks, electronic producers chasing risers, or anyone who wants tasteful movement on drums and vocals without drawing automation. The reverse-swell-into-the-hit is the genuinely original bit, and 1.2's MIDI harmony pushes it from "clever effect" toward "small instrument." It won't be on every track, but on the right ones it does something nothing else quite does.

Pros: Genuinely novel concept. Gorgeous spectral and harmonized swells. MIDI harmony is inspiring. Cheap, and cross-platform now.

Cons: Niche by design. Mix-time latency. MIDI routing awkward in Logic.