There’s a Blackfeet story about Old Man — Napi — who saw berries reflected in a stream and kept diving in to grab them. Every time he came up empty, he saw them again, dove deeper, tied rocks to his legs, nearly drowned. Finally he crawled to shore, looked up, and saw the berries hanging on a bush above his head. What he’d been chasing in the water had been there all along.
Mike Trombley built the NativeAudio In the Water around that story. It’s a reverb, a delay, a drone engine, and a meditation on chasing reflections.
The core is the Reflections engine — reversed, refracted echoes that bloom octaves above and below your signal. Ripples controls how much the surface moves, from a single shimmer to near-oscillation. Reflections sets the length of the echo trail and how much octave bloom spreads out. Mix blends your dry signal with the wash. Every reflection lands in a different place in the stereo field, so the whole thing moves around you instead of stacking in the middle.
Then there’s Wave Gen. Hold the switch, play a single note, release, and the pedal builds a five-voice pad underneath you — the root, two detuned voices that chorus against each other, an octave up, and a voice three octaves up. Each voice drifts and pans independently. A low-pass filter with resonance shapes the drone, and the filter slowly drifts on its own so even a held note keeps evolving. You can retune the drone by holding and playing a new note, or cut it with a quick press.
It runs stereo in and out, true stereo if you want it. Trails on or off. Expression pedal or MIDI control over any parameter. You can even play the drone from a MIDI keyboard — no capture needed.
$272 USD. Available now from nativeaudio.com. It’s a pedal about what happens when you stop diving and start listening.
