Eventide Blackhole: Reverb for Massive Metal Soundscapes

Reverb in metal isn't just for making things sound like they're in a room. It's a creative tool for building atmosphere, adding epic scale, and creating textures that define a track's mood. While a simple plate reverb on a snare or a short room on a guitar solo has its place, sometimes you need something… bigger. Something otherworldly.

That’s where a plugin like the Eventide Blackhole comes in. It’s not your go-to for subtle, realistic spaces. It’s a specialized tool designed to create vast, modulating, and often unnatural-sounding reverbs that can transform a source from a simple instrument into a full-blown atmospheric event. And for modern metal producers, that’s an incredibly powerful thing to have in your arsenal.

What is the Eventide Blackhole Plugin?

Originally born from a legendary algorithm in Eventide's DSP4000 and H8000 hardware rack units, the Blackhole plugin brings that iconic sound into your DAW. Unlike convolution reverbs that use impulses of real spaces or algorithmic reverbs trying to emulate halls and chambers, Blackhole is pure effect. It excels at creating impossibly large spaces, shimmering drones, and evolving tails that feel more like a synthesizer pad than a reflection.

Think of it as a texture generator that happens to be a reverb. Its key controls allow you to bend the laws of physics:

• Size & Gravity: These are the heart of the Blackhole sound. "Size" goes from a small room to a space the size of a galaxy. "Gravity" is a unique control that works like an inverse decay, pulling the reverb tail back in on itself or pushing it out into an infinite decay.
• Modulation: The built-in modulation can add subtle movement or deep, chorus-like swirls to the reverb tail, preventing it from sounding static and sterile.
• Freeze Button: This is a sound designer’s dream. It captures the current reverb buffer and holds it indefinitely, creating an instant ambient pad from any source material you feed it.

Why Blackhole is a Go-To for Metal Producers

So, how does a cosmic-sounding reverb fit into a genre known for aggression and punch? In a ton of ways. Modern metal is all about dynamics, contrast, and creating moments of impact. Here’s where to use it.

Creating Epic Intros and Transitions

This is Blackhole’s bread and butter. Got a clean guitar part, a piano melody, or a synth pad opening up a track? Sending it to a Blackhole reverb on an aux track immediately creates a massive sense of space and anticipation, a key component in crafting epic buildups.

Actionable Tip: Set the Mix knob to 100% wet on your reverb bus. Automate the send level to swell up at the end of a clean passage right before a heavy riff kicks in. The massive wall of reverb will create tension, and cutting it off right as the distortion hits makes the riff feel even more impactful.

Adding Immense Depth to Lead Guitars

Your typical lead guitar reverb is there to give it some space and help it sit in the mix. Blackhole is for when you want the solo to sound like it’s being played from the edge of the universe. For melodic leads, post-rock inspired sections, or ambient guitar layers, it’s unbeatable.

Actionable Tip: Always use Blackhole on a send, not as an insert. Understanding when and why is a core mixing skill, so it’s worth knowing the difference between insert vs. send setups for your time-based effects. On the aux channel, place an EQ before the reverb. High-pass the signal going into the Blackhole at around 200-300Hz to prevent low-end mud from washing out your entire mix. You know all about EQing metal guitars for max impact, and the same rules apply to what you feed your effects. A clean input leads to a clean, massive output.

Unconventional Drum Ambience

You wouldn’t slap this on your main drum bus, but for creating special effects, it’s a killer tool. Sending your snare to a heavily compressed, long-tailed Blackhole reverb on a parallel bus can create those huge, explosive snare sounds popular in industrial and cinematic metal, not unlike some techniques used to make small drum rooms sound massive.

Actionable Tip: On your snare reverb aux, insert a gate before Blackhole. Set the threshold so that only the main snare hits open the gate. This technique creates a massive, non-linear reverb tail that blooms after the snare hit and then disappears completely, keeping your verses clean and your big impacts huge.

Vocal Washes and Post-Rock Textures

For clean singing, spoken-word passages, or layering behind aggressive screamed vocals, Blackhole can add an ethereal, ghostly texture. It’s a more dramatic approach than using lo-fi vocal echoes, but it achieves a similar goal of adding dynamic interest and atmosphere.

Actionable Tip: Find a long, sustained clean vocal note at the end of a phrase. Use the "Freeze" button to capture its reverb tail. You can then automate the volume of that frozen pad to create a custom, evolving synthesizer-like texture that’s perfectly in key with the song.

Does a "Magic" Plugin Like this Really Matter?

This is where the bigger conversation about plugins comes in. Does using the Eventide Blackhole suddenly make your mixes better? No. But it does give you a specific sound that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.

In our philosophy, some plugins are specialized tools for specific jobs. Need to tame harshness in your cymbals without making them sound dull? A dynamic resonance suppressor like the JST Frequency Sniper is a game-changer. Want that specific modern metal guitar chug? It sure as hell matters if you’re using something like the Neural DSP Omega Granophyre or a stock DAW amp sim. Blackhole falls squarely into this category. If you want that sound, you need a tool built for it.

But for the everyday jobs? The broad EQ strokes, the transparent compression, the simple room reverbs? Your stock plugins are more than powerful enough. People get hung up on collecting 20 different SSL-style compressors, but the truth is, your skills matter more than the specific brand of your tool. Your time is better spent learning the basics of compression for mixing rock and metal than chasing the next shiny plugin.

The real art is knowing when to reach for a specialized tool like Blackhole and when to stick with the basics.

Putting It All Into Practice

Knowing how to use a plugin is half the battle. Knowing why you’re using it and how it fits into the context of a dense, powerful metal mix is what separates the pros from the hobbyists.

It’s one thing to read about automating a reverb send; it's another to watch a producer like Jens Bogren, Will Putney, or Nolly Getgood do it in a real session, explaining their thought process every step of the way. They aren’t just turning knobs—they’re making deliberate choices that serve the song.

That’s what Nail The Mix is all about. You get the raw multitracks from bands like Lamb of God, Gojira, and Trivium and watch the producer who mixed the record rebuild it from scratch. You see how they use reverbs like Blackhole not in isolation, but in context with every other element, from the kick drum to the final master bus chain.

Check out the full catalog of Nail The Mix sessions and see how the world's best instructors build their signature sounds from the ground up. It’s the ultimate way to level up your skills and learn to make the tools you own work for you.