PrimaVerb & SolaVerb: My New Go-To Reverb Effects in the Sunday Keys App
Everything worship keys players and worship leaders need to know about the new reverb engines in the Sunday Keys App and how to use them at your church.
New Reverbs, Completely Remastered
If you've been using Sunday Keys for a while, you'll remember Space Verb and Pure Verb, the original reverb effects built into the App. They were useful, but they've now been deprecated and replaced with two dramatically improved engines: PrimaVerb and SolaVerb.
PrimaVerb: Acoustic Space Emulation
PrimaVerb offers beautiful room and hall sounds. PrimaVerb replaces the deprecated Pure Verb plugin. Its job is to recreate the feel of a real acoustic environment, a small studio room, a concert hall, a grand cathedral, etc. If you want your instrument to feel like it's in a space, PrimaVerb is your starting point.
PrimaVerb Core Controls
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Dry / Wet | Balances the original signal against the reverb signal. Start subtle, a little goes a long way on acoustic instruments. |
| Reverb Size | Select distinct acoustic environments: small, medium, large rooms and halls, ambient hall, and cathedral. Each has its own tonal character, not just different lengths. |
| Pre-delay | The gap between the direct sound and the first reverberant reflections. Low values feel tight and close; high values create a slap-back style delay. |
| Reflectivity | How live or acoustically treated the space is. At maximum, you approach an infinite cloud that never decays. Dial this back for a treated room feel, even within a cathedral-sized space. |
| Low Cut | Removes low-end muddiness from the reverb tail. Essential for dense arrangements. |
| Tone | High-end rolloff. Eg: Dark cathedrals vs. bright halls. |
| Quality | Increase for max quality, or reduce the sample rate for a lo-fi character. NOT A REAL TIME CONTROL, set it in advance. |
| Chorus Amount / Rate | Adds chorus modulation to the wet signal before it enters the reverb. Use subtly for pitch modulation and movement, or crank it for an unstable, warped space. |
Best uses for PrimaVerb
PrimaVerb excels anywhere you want to add a convincing sense of physical space to a sound:
- Concert grand piano: place it in a hall or cathedral for that large-room warmth
- Strings and orchestral patches: add realistic reverb without washing out detail
- Synth plucks and arps: a small room with a short tail makes them feel alive
- B3 organ: a subtle amount makes the Leslie speaker feel like it's in an actual room
- Any sound you want to spatialize without fundamentally transforming its character
SolaVerb: Ambient & Transformative Reverb
SolaVerb brings incredibly lush, spacious, and diffuse modulated verbs. SolaVerb replaces Space Verb and is built for a very different purpose. Rather than recreating a real space, it's designed to transform a sound, to push it into a different dimension, add a lush modulated texture underneath it, or turn an ordinary instrument into a pad-like cloud of sound.
What's the same as PrimaVerb
SolaVerb shares several controls with PrimaVerb: Dry/Wet, Pre-delay, Size, Reflectivity, Quality, Low Cut, and Tone all work the same way.
What's different: Dual Modulation
SolaVerb adds a second, more sophisticated modulation option alongside the standard chorus:
| Modulation type | How it works |
|---|---|
| Pitch Modulation | Applies different amounts of pitch modulation to each individual delay line inside the reverb engine. The result is far more diffuse, lush, and organic than chorus alone, less like a chorus effect, more like the reverb itself is alive and breathing. |
|
Chorus Amount / Rate |
Applies chorus modulation to the overall wet signal before it enters the reverb, same as in PrimaVerb. Broad, sweeping modulation across the whole tail. |
Turning anything into a pad with SolaVerb
One of the most striking uses of SolaVerb is as a pad generator. The technique used in the video with a dry B3 organ demonstrates how far this can go.
Organ Example: Settings in SolaVerb to Convert Organ to Organ Pad.
- Enable SolaVerb on any instrument
- Set Wet to 100, Dry to 0. (increase dry as needed)
- Bring chorus amount and rate down, then increase pitch modulation
- Roll the tone back to reduce high-frequencies
- Increase size (not a real-time control)
- Push reflectivity up for a longer sustaining cloud
The result is a smooth, flowing pad that follows your chord changes naturally, with none of the abrupt cutoffs you'd get from a dry instrument patch.
How to choose: the rule of thumb
Reach for PrimaVerb when...
- You want the sound to feel real and grounded
- You're working with acoustic instruments
- You need fast, snappy transients with a sense of room
- You want to spatialize without transforming
- CPU efficiency matters and you need a lush result fast
Reach for SolaVerb when...
- You want to push a sound into another dimension
- You're building ambient pad textures
- You need modulation that's thick and organic
- You want to cover chord changes without abrupt transitions
- You want to add a lush layer underneath the mix
Both reverbs can cover similar ground, but they have clear areas of excellence. Importantly, you can use them simultaneously, stack PrimaVerb to give an arp a sense of space, then layer SolaVerb underneath to add texture and movement beneath the dry signal.
How to get PrimaVerb & SolaVerb
Both reverbs are available now in the latest version of the Sunday Keys App for iPad and Mac.
- Update the Sunday Keys App in the iPad or Mac App Store
- Open the Sound Downloads Manager, Update Sound Library
Once updated, every patch in Sunday Keys has been remastered by the Sunday Sounds team to take full advantage of these new effects. You're not just getting new plugins, you're getting an entirely reworked sound library built around them.
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