A Pay-What-You-Want Reverb

Built Around Five Real Bathrooms

bathROOMs is a character reverb plugin from Hot Shower Audio built around an unusual idea: instead of presenting abstract reverb algorithms and conventional technical controls, it gives you five different bathroom-inspired spaces and lets you manipulate the physical qualities of the room itself.

Created by Colombian Latin Grammy–credited mix engineer Alejandro Ramírez (Ramalejo), bathROOMs was born from his search for a particular sense of space he couldn’t find in existing reverbs. Five of its eight main knobs are therefore dedicated specifically to manipulating the virtual room.

Best of all, bathROOMs is available as pay what you want, including $0, for macOS and Windows.

A Different Approach to Reverb

Most reverbs ask you to think in terms of decay times, diffusion, damping and early reflections.

bathROOMs approaches the problem differently.

Instead of requiring you to understand exactly what is happening behind the scenes, its controls describe recognizable properties of a physical room.

Want harder walls? Change Surface.

Want to move closer to the room? Adjust Position.

Want a steamy, warmer environment? Turn up Temp.

Want clearly defined reflections to dissolve into a cloud? Increase Wash.

The result is a reverb that encourages you to think about the space you want to hear, rather than the DSP parameters required to create it.

Five Different Bathrooms

At the heart of bathROOMs are five spaces, each offering a different size and tonal character.

Lavender

The smallest and darkest room.

Lavender creates an intimate space that closes around the source quickly while naturally softening its upper frequencies.

It should work particularly well when you want ambience without making an instrument sound distant.

Porcelain

Porcelain is the balanced middle ground of the collection.

It offers medium size and medium brightness and acts as the reference point against which the other rooms are positioned.

Cove

The largest and most airy bathroom.

Cove provides the longest sensation of space among the five rooms and is the obvious starting point for sounds that need a more expansive environment.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse sits between Porcelain and Cove.

It is slightly larger and livelier than Porcelain but does not extend as far as Cove.

Baldosa

Small, hard and reflective.

With little simulated softness to absorb the reflections, its slap remains noticeably brighter.

These aren’t simply five preset names: they represent five different starting spaces running through the same underlying engine.

Position — Move Through the Room

Position controls your perceived distance within the space.

Moving backward makes the room:

• Darker
• Narrower
• More enclosed

Moving forward makes it:

• Brighter
• More open

Hot Shower Audio describes Position as effectively doing the work of several conventional reverb parameters with a single control.

This is a clever approach because distance in a real acoustic environment doesn’t affect just one property. It changes the balance between direct and reflected sound as well as our perception of brightness and spatial width.

Surface — Change the Walls

Surface controls how reflective or absorptive the virtual bathroom becomes.

Hard tile preserves high-frequency reflections, while moving toward softer materials such as towels and curtains progressively absorbs the upper frequencies as the sound continues to reflect around the room.

This provides an intuitive way of controlling reverb brightness without simply reaching for a conventional high-frequency damping parameter.

Slap — Parallel-Wall Reflections

Bathrooms often contain hard, parallel surfaces, producing distinctive rapid reflections.

The Slap control recreates this behavior through its own feedback loop.

Increasing it emphasizes the characteristic back-and-forth reflection associated with sound bouncing between opposing tiled walls.

It can add rhythmic character and movement rather than simply increasing the overall amount of reverb.

Wash — From Walls to Clouds

Wash determines the balance between recognizable individual reflections and a more diffuse reverb cloud.

Turn it down and you hear more of the room’s individual reflection structure.

Turn it up and those reflections begin to merge into a smoother atmospheric wash.

This makes Wash particularly useful for moving between relatively realistic room ambience and more atmospheric reverb treatments.

Temp — Hot or Cold?

Perhaps the most unusual control is Temp.

It represents the temperature of the water.

Cold settings create a brighter and harder character reminiscent of exposed tile and glass.

Hotter settings become warmer and softer, evoking the sensation of a bathroom filling with steam.

Obviously, this isn’t intended as literal acoustic temperature simulation. Instead, it’s an intuitive metaphor for controlling the overall mood and tonal character of the space.

And in a plugin called bathROOMs, it makes perfect sense.

Built-In Sidechain Ducker

bathROOMs also contains an integrated reverb ducker.

The reverb can react either to the source itself or to an external sidechain signal.

When the triggering audio is present, the room moves out of the way. When the signal recedes, the reverb naturally returns.

Four controls are provided:

• Threshold
• Attack
• Release
• Ratio

Higher Ratio settings produce more obvious ducking, while lower values allow the effect to remain subtle.

This is particularly useful on vocals, where large reverbs can create atmosphere but also obscure intelligibility.

It can also work beautifully on:

• Synth leads
• Pads
• Guitars
• Snare drums
• Melodic instruments
• Cinematic material

A/B Comparison

bathROOMs provides two complete A/B slots.

You can build two different room configurations, instantly compare them and copy settings between slots.

This is a valuable mixing feature because subtle differences between reverb configurations can be difficult to evaluate when constantly changing parameters back and forth.

Curated Presets

Rather than filling the plugin with hundreds of presets, Hot Shower Audio includes a smaller collection of starting points created with input from working engineers.

The idea is to use them as foundations and then manipulate the room yourself.

This fits the overall philosophy of bathROOMs: fewer abstract options, more direct interaction.

Dark Mode

There is even a dedicated Dark Mode for late-night studio sessions.

It doesn’t change the sound, but your eyes may appreciate it at 2 AM.

Best Uses

bathROOMs should be particularly interesting for vocals, where Position, Surface and Temp can establish a convincing sense of intimacy while the built-in ducker prevents the reverb from masking the performance.

For guitars and acoustic instruments, the harder bathroom spaces can provide short, characterful reflections that feel quite different from conventional halls and plates.

On synthesizers and pads, increasing Wash can transform the room into something much more atmospheric, while Slap can introduce additional movement.

And for experimental electronic music and sound design, the unusual room controls provide an alternative to the conventional decay/damping/diffusion workflow found in most reverbs.

Compatibility

bathROOMs is available for both macOS and Windows.

macOS

• VST3
• AU
• AAX
• Apple Silicon
• Intel
• macOS 11.0 or later
• Signed and notarized by Apple

Windows

• VST3
• Standalone
• Windows 10 or later
• 64-bit

Pay What You Want — Including Free

bathROOMs uses a pay-what-you-want model.

You can choose how much to support the developer, but the minimum price is $0, making bathROOMs effectively available as a free plugin.

Final Verdict

bathROOMs stands out because it doesn’t try to win a specification battle with conventional reverbs.

Its attraction is the interface between the musician and the algorithm.

Controls such as Position, Surface, Slap, Wash and Temp encourage you to think about physical and emotional characteristics rather than milliseconds, diffusion percentages and damping frequencies.

Behind that playful concept is a genuinely useful production tool: five contrasting spaces, a built-in sidechain ducker, A/B comparison and enough control to move from tight room ambience to diffuse atmospheric reverb.

For producers tired of reverbs that all seem to present the same parameters with different interfaces, bathROOMs is an original free/pay-what-you-want reverb well worth trying.

Source : hotshoweraudio.com