Hollywood Scoring Stages is an algorithmic reverb and stage placement tool by Samplicity. It can be preordered for €169 (regular price €239). The release is estimated for early May 2026.
There is light and shadow in the demos for me. The brass sounds good. The reverb can create depth realistically. The harp does sound boomy to me, and on the guitar example, it does something weird to the midrange. I don't like the drums example at all.
Samplicity's approach of giving you back several mic signals, as you would have when recording live, speaks to me. It's more versatile than SPAT's one signal that you get.
I will keep an eye on Hollywood Scoring Stages. With the mixed results of the demos for me, I am not preordering now.
I bought it during the presale because Peter Roos does a reliable job I find with his plugins.
So far it seems to be very good with dry recorded material. Especially the positioning mode which can be selected and shuts the tail down is very useful. I didn't have the time to compare it to SPAT but will do. I think it does similar things with less controllable parameters. And on a pretty big track I do right now it doesn't get in the way performance wise which is nice. No crashes till now- knocking on wood.
I think it's mainly for dry material modelled instruments and self recorded dry things like guitars, percussion and should be used as an insert as I understand it. It's probably not your typical send reverb. The default setting doesn't even use the wet dry knob. But it can be used for it. Similar to SPAT in that regard.
I'll post some examples later.
Thanks Markus. It would be great if you could post some demos.
I just realized that the installers on the website work as a fully functional demo for 14 days. I will test it against the plugins that are in my template.
So here is a very little and unprofessional demo of two guitars recorded near miced with an A-B micro setting.
Right now I only show the positioning feature. In the track where I took the example I go with another send verb and I probably will continue to do so. Examples with the reverb turned on don't sound well imo. I have to check more how to set these up.
I quite like it. Not in an ecstatically Wow!!’-sort of way, but enough to see uses for it. It’s not SPAT, and it certainly can’t make one forget SPAT, nor is it, in its current version, a one-stop solution for all spatialization challenges (in my limited experience with it, anyway), but I’ve tried a couple of things with it and some of those, I thought, turned out rather nice.
Oddly enough, I’ve had far more success — or results I happen to be pleased with, anyway — with suggestions of smaller and drier spaces than with anything that the name of the plug-in suggests it is an answer for.
For example, I’ve been trying to place a plaintive horn melody (using the AcousticSamples VHorn) in a space that is compatible with the Spitfire Bespoke Strings space (Air Lyndhurst), and I just can get the combination ‘VHorn + ScoreStage’ to sound right. Whatever mix and balance of microphones I tried, whatever edits I made or settings I chose, the result was always rather blurry, washy and excessively diffused, with the horn either not sitting right in the space or all but drowning in ScoreStage’s obtrusive processing. (Never encountered any such problems in SPAT.) So, like Markus concluded, and I agree: for certain types of spatialization, perhaps a combination of ScoreStage (for placement duties) plus an additional good reverb is, for the time being, the best way towards satisfying results.
I was very pleased though to discover that the two mic pairs (‘Wide’ and ‘Ambient’) which didn’t impress me all that much when trying to conjure large spaces, are wonderfully useful and actually remarkably convincing when it comes to smaller ones, such as chambers and rooms. At leasty, to my ears, they are.
The way it looks to me at the moment, I’d say ScoreStage gives you somewhere around 20% of a serious alternative for SPAT, but before you say that’s an awfully low percentage, keep in mind that there was a lot in SPAT — whenever I say SPAT, by the way, I mean the old SPATv3 plug-in — that was of little practical use for standard stereo mixing anyway, so when a new plug-in covers 20% of it, it is in fact closer to 50%-60% of the functionality in SPAT that was of real use. Which is not all that bad.
One thing that, in my opinion, definitely needs some more attention from the developer is the frequency response of the microphones. ScoreStage could really do with some additional parameters to edit, in fine detail, the frequency profiles of the microphones. With some of the things I tried, certain frequencies seemed to resonate much more strongly in the spatialization than others. Which is rather annoying and also a problem that is actually quite difficult to address satisfactorily. (It can be lessened by EQ’ing the source before it enters ScoreStage so that less of those frequencies, which trigger the problem, are present, but that’s far from an ideal solution.)
Two other areas where (the current version of) ScoreStage doesn’t compare favourably with SPAT are (1) control over the source and the width and directionality of its sound projection (though I understand that some of this might be addressed in future updates) and (2) placement automation. You can automate most of ScoreStages’ parameters, but none of the ones that have to do with the placement of the source or the microphones. Which is a pity. And even if those parameters could be automated, in (the current version of) ScoreStage it’s best to only do that when there’s no sound being processed, because during an edit (= while changing parameters), the sound gets momentarily quite phasey and crackly and thus pretty useless. So assuming you could move an instrument, via automation, from point A to point B in the mix — something I used to do all the time with SPAT and which SPAT could do effortlessy and without even the tiniest hint of sonic problems —, that would only be possible in ScoreStage during silences in between phrases.
Another thing I used to like to do with SPAT, is simulate microphone technique, meaning: a player’s or vocalist’s skill to move a little further away or closer to the microphone depending on the dynamics of the performance. That’s obviously impossible with the current version of ScoreStage as well.
But there is plenty that is possible (and that sounds good) and once you get familiar with the proper balancing of the four mic perspectives — and their powers of spatial suggestion in relation to the size of the space — and have also learned how the other parameters affect the plug-in’s output, you start seeing that ScoreStage is a very, very useful tool to have.
Anything that helps make the sad departure of SPATv3 a little more tolerable, even if it is only by small percentage, has to be welcomed with some amount of goodwill, joy and gratitude, I think.
