How to use Parlor · The manual

At a glance MT-06

Parlor is a reverb you play by standing somewhere. A 2D stage pad sets the room and where you are in it; four knobs, a pilot lamp and a menu of named places do the rest. There are seven parameters in total, and that is the point.

At Mix 0 it is bit-exact dry, and the wet path is engineered so it cannot redline, however hard you drive it.

Signal path Signal, not screenshot

in ─┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─→ out
     │                                                  dry    +
     └→ pre-delay → early reflections ─┬─→ + → ducker ─── wet ┘
                     (the walls)       └─→ diffusion → FDN tail
                                          (four allpasses)  (the air)
                                        the ducker follows the dry input

Set up From insert to first sound

01 Insert Parlor on the track or an aux send. It is an audio effect.
02 Drag the puck on the stage pad. Left to right is the room, TIGHT to VAST; up and down is where you stand, NEAR to FAR.
03 Or pick a place from the menu to set the room in one move, then nudge the pad from there.
04 Set TONE for the colour of the tail and MIX for how much room you hear. Add DUCK if the reverb needs to step back while the source plays.

The controls Every parameter

The stage pad

One puck on a paper stage. Its two axes are two parameters.

SIZE TIGHT … VAST: Horizontal: how big the room is. Bigger rooms push the first reflection later, up to 120 ms, and hold a longer tail, from a 0.2 second closet to 12 seconds of hall.
DISTANCE NEAR … FAR: Vertical: where you stand. Up close is drier and more defined; step back and the room takes over and the highs soften, since distance pulls the damping down on its own, before TONE says anything.

The knobs

TONE dark … bright: What the room is made of, dark to bright: a material control that damps the reverb on a log scale. The tail also loses highs as it decays, faster when TONE is dark, the way air behaves.
MIX dry … wet: The dry to wet blend, equal power, sitting at a quarter wet out of the box. At 0 the output is bit-exact dry.
DUCK 0 … 1: Steps the room back while you sing or play and lets it swell back in the gaps. It follows the dry input, ducking in about 5 ms and returning at the RELEASE knob’s pace, and gates only the wet, so the tail returns intact.
RELEASE 20 … 2000 ms: How quickly the ducked room swells back, read out in whole milliseconds. It ships at 250 ms; shorten it for a pumping return, stretch it so the room breathes back in slowly.
VOCAL FOCUS on / off: The clay pilot lamp under the knob column, on by default. It makes the ducker frequency-aware, so the reverb steps aside for the voice band instead of ducking the whole room, and the lows and air stay put while the words come through.

Places and bank

PLACES 6 named + Custom: Wood Room, Stairwell, Chapel, Plate, Behind a Curtain and Grand Parlor. Picking one writes the distance, size and tone and gets out of the way; the menu reads Custom the moment you move a control.
A–F BANK 6 slots: Click a saved slot to recall it; click an empty slot and it adopts the current sound; shift-click saves. Each slot’s dot tells its state: filled is active, hollow is active but edited since recall, faint is saved. Slots travel with the session and are shared between Parlor instances through a small bank file.

First five minutes A short walkthrough

01 Insert Parlor on a send and turn MIX up so you can hear the room.
02 Drag the puck around the pad and listen: right for a bigger room, up and down for closer or further away.
03 Try a named place, say Wood Room, then move the pad from there to make it yours.
04 Set TONE for the tail’s colour and pull MIX back to sit the room behind the source.
05 On a vocal, add a little DUCK so the reverb ducks under the words and blooms between them.

Recipes Named workflows

A vocal that stays forward

01 Stand NEAR on the pad and keep the room modest in size.
02 Add some DUCK so the tail steps back while the vocal sings.
03 Keep MIX low; you want the sense of a room, not a wash.

A live drum room

01 Pick Wood Room and stand near-ish rather than far.
02 Keep the tail short and TONE on the warmer side.
03 Blend with MIX until the kit sounds like it is in a room, not drowning in one.

An ending wash

01 Move the puck far and vast for a long, deep tail.
02 Darken TONE so the wash does not hiss.
03 Raise MIX and let the room ring out; the tail is reported to the host so the ring is not cut short.

Good to know The fine print

Seven parameters is the design, not a shortfall. There is no separate width, freeze or EQ page: the pad’s two axes, TONE, MIX, DUCK, RELEASE and VOCAL FOCUS are the whole instrument. The stereo is the room’s own, with no width knob to manage: the walls arrive decorrelated left and right, and the tail’s width comes from how the eight lines are dealt to the two sides.
Mix 0 is bit-exact dry. The dry path never passes through the wet-bus safety, so a bypass is a true bypass.
The wet bus is built so the room can never redline, and if anything non-finite ever enters the tail the network clears itself and fades back in over 50 ms, a blip rather than a locked screamer. The safety covers the wet bus, though, not the sum: Parlor is not an output limiter, and a hot dry signal at a middle MIX can still clip downstream.
A named place is a gesture, not a saved parameter. Move any control and the menu says Custom; the A to F bank is where you keep a sound you want back.
Every plugin in the suite maps the same way: click the MIDI chip in the header (it reads MIDI, MIDI · N, or MIDI · OFF) and the editor dims into learn mode with a balloon on every mappable control, plus ENABLE MIDI per instance, ALL PARAMETERS..., CLEAR ALL and DONE (Esc works too). One CC drives one parameter, on any channel, saved the moment you map it; switches and short lists step relative to the knob. The window also resizes from its corner.