Universal Audio’s Sound City Studios reverb plugin is currently 84% off at Plugin Boutique, bringing the price down from $249 to $39 until April 30th.
If you’re looking for a natural-sounding reverb plugin, especially for rock and pop, this is a great pick.
UAD Sound City Studios is more than a reverb, though. It’s basically a studio-in-a-box type of setup that lets you place your tracks inside Sound City’s famous Room A, the same space heard on records from Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, and many others.
The studio’s history even inspired a full-length documentary directed by Dave Grohl. It’s a fun watch, whether or not you’re picking up the UAD plugin. I’ll paste the trailer below.
Now, back to the UAD emulation of this studio.
The plugin works in two modes. Remic mode fully replaces your original recording’s mic sound with Sound City’s modeled microphones, while Reverb mode blends the room ambience with your dry signal using a mix knob and pre-delay control.
You choose a source type (drums, guitar, vocals, ensembles, or piano) and pick from different voicings that recreate how the room reacts to each source. For drums, for example, you can switch between Live (open room, no dampening), Tight (with gobos for a more focused sound), and Wood Corner (maximum reflections).
The mic locker includes classic condenser and ribbon models from AKG, Neumann, and RCA. You get three mic positions per source (one close, two room), and you can drag them closer or farther from the source in real time to shape the sound.
Every mic runs through an emulation of Sound City’s iconic British console, complete with a 3-band EQ and inline compressor that colored everything recorded there since the early ’70s.
The effects section adds even more tools to play with for coloring your sound.
There’s an emulation of the Rev E 1176 compressor with several modes, including Crush (aggressive single-band compression, great on drums), Air (a bright, airy multiband expansion that’s a classic trick for background vocals), and Encode (a unique multiband expansion that shapes both frequency response and dynamics).
These are all based on the Dolby A301 noise reduction system, which Sound City engineers famously used in creative ways far beyond its intended purpose.
There’s also a reverb chamber modeled after the studio’s echo chamber, with dynamic, small-diaphragm condenser, and ribbon mic pairs.
The plugin runs as UAD Native, so no UA hardware is required. You’ll need a free iLok account (iLok Cloud or a physical USB dongle) for authorization, though.
Sound City Studios is compatible with macOS 11 or above and Windows 10/11 (64-bit) in VST3, AU, and AAX formats. It does not work in GarageBand.
This article contains affiliate links, which means BPB may earn a commission if you purchase through those links at no extra cost to you.
Download: UAD Sound City Studios ($39, 84% off until April 30th)
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Last Updated on April 13, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
