half light: Taped Spaces Reverb Plug-In

half light is Mitchell Schneider and David Riddle. Taped Spaces is their first full plug-in (they’ve also made some Kontakt instruments), but they’ve been playing music together for over a decade since they met in Nashville in 2012. Let’s start with their music. In the tradition of Eno (Brian and Roger), Budd, and Lanois [Tape Op #85, #149, #127], half light make really beautiful, mostly instrumental music. I’d suggest going to their site or their page on Tidal, Spotify, etc., while you read the rest of this review. In their “day jobs,” Mitch and David do a lot of commercial music and production as well as programming for live performances, and have worked for artists including Charli XCX, Zach Bryan, and Taylor Swift. Mitch is based in Nashville, TN, and David is in Dallas, TX, so their collaborations are primarily remote.

Taped Spaces is a very sparse and straightforward reverb plug-in that sounds great. I like to think of it as the (Universal Audio) LA-2A of reverbs; just a few knobs but sounds great, and it’s hard to fuck up a track with it. My Lexicon mcdsp60 reverb is similar, but Taped Spaces is more versatile, with continuously variable knobs instead of switches for tone and decay. It’s a convolution reverb based on seven impulse responses (IRs) that David and Mitch created using various hardware chains that included some high-end hardware reverb units, a handful of older tape machines, and other outboard gear to provide saturation and coloration. The seven IRs move from shorter and cleaner to longer and more colored. The IRs (or modes) have impressionistic names like “the pianist” and “moonchamber.” The shortlist of included presets is thoughtful but not overly extensive, provides good starting points for almost any kind of track, and each are also straight ahead and musically named. I spent some time with Taped Spaces while prepping mixes on a recent project, and presets like “vocal chamber,” “dark tight snare,” and “vibrant acoustic guitar” sound as you’d hope they would, and all add a nice finish to tracks I used them on. This is a musical, rather than technical, reverb plug-in. If you want to get under the hood and tweak the roll-off of early reflections, this is not for you – though there are controls for Lo and Hi Cut. If you want a really nice sounding reverb that is easy to use, and always sounds great, check out Taped Spaces.