Hot Shower Audio's first plugin is a pun that turned out to actually work. bathROOMs is a reverb modeled on five real bathrooms, given away for free on August 19, 2026. The joke in the studio's name lands twice once you spot the control called Temp, and it isn't for filter cutoff. It's for water temperature.
Why is a free plugin raising money for an earthquake in Colombia?
bathROOMs is the debut release from Alejandro Ramirez, a mix engineer who works under the name Ramalejo and carries credits on 4 Latin Grammy-winning projects across 23 nominations. He's Colombian, and on August 10, 2026 an earthquake damaged homes in El Cairo, a town in Colombia. Ramirez set the plugin to pay-what-you-want with a floor of $0, and every optional payment made through September 13, 2026 goes straight to El Cairo's municipal government to help rebuild homes and bathrooms damaged in the quake. It's a neat piece of framing that doesn't feel bolted on after the fact: a plugin modeled on bathroom acoustics, funding the rebuilding of actual ones, days after the disaster rather than months later.
What's actually inside bathROOMs?
Five rooms ship as the core presets. Lavender is the smallest and darkest, closing in fast. Porcelain sits in the middle as the reference room. Greenhouse is slightly bigger and livelier than Porcelain. Cove is the largest and airiest, with the longest sense of space. Baldosa recreates a small, hard-surfaced Colombian bathroom built around hydraulic tile and an electric shower, with a bright, exposed slap. Rather than freezing each room as a fixed impulse, Ramirez built shaping controls around the captures: Position moves you closer to or further from the space, narrower and darker stepping back, more open stepping forward; Surface swaps in harder or softer wall material, bare tile keeps the highs ringing while towels or curtains soak them up; and Temp, the plugin's signature gag control, tilts the tone from a bright, hard "cold" reverb to a warmer, softer "hot" one. Wash blends distinct early reflections against a diffuse cloud, Slap adds parallel-wall echo with its own feedback loop, and standard Pre-Delay, a 0.1 to 30 second Decay and Dry/Wet round out the panel. A built-in ducker (threshold, ratio, attack, release, with an optional external sidechain input) pulls the tail back automatically so a vocal or lead doesn't get buried without hand-automating the send. The plugin also ships 27 additional presets contributed by five outside engineers and producers, on top of the five default rooms.
Why record a reverb in a bathroom instead of coding another algorithm?
Most algorithmic hall and plate reverbs on the market draw from the same handful of mathematical models, which is exactly why so many start to sound interchangeable once the decay stretches past a few seconds. A real room, even an unglamorous one, carries flaws an algorithm rarely bothers simulating: the specific ring off tile, the way a small enclosed space compresses reflections into something dense and grainy instead of smooth. That's been pulling more producers, especially in house's rougher, more textured corners built around field recordings and lo-fi character, toward captured-space reverb over factory presets. bathROOMs leans into the least glamorous version of that idea: not a cathedral or a vintage studio live room, just five bathrooms, the kind of space plenty of people reading this have actually sung into. It's free, pay-what-you-want starting at $0, and runs as VST3, AU and AAX on macOS 11 or later (Apple Silicon and Intel, universal binary) and as a 64-bit VST3 plugin or standalone app on Windows 10 and up, so nothing stops a bedroom producer from trying it today.
