#39

oh man… i have those somewhere… i bought them when i was using MOTU’s built-in convolution in DP… and dropping in spirit canyon’s weird audio files… it was very cool. i probably have them on a backup drive somewhere…

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#40

Thanks for posting that, really cool to hear, sounds good indeed. Yeah shame that particular sample is mono, thats a disadvantage of this found-sound approach, too many phone-camera mono videos

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#41

I’ve been mucking around with a setup like this tonight and it wasn’t insanely heavy on the processing. Admittedly I’m not playing a lot of notes at a time. But basically I wanted to use IRs of different chords and cycle through a progression and it worked quite well.

I’m using Bitwig with multiple instances of the Melda Productions MConvolutionMB VST plugin. One of Bitwig’s modulation sources allows for a kind of round robin switching between fx each time you press a note, so I haven’t assigned different convolution to specific notes. Happy to explain more if that’s unclear.

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#42

Been having fun today playing Reaper’s tone generator live thru a very long impulse for melodic drone, will record soon.

EDIT: a fb friend of mine uploaded an album of lo-fi impulses today: https://uhlectronic.bandcamp.com/album/tinyverb-ir

EDIT again (shame we can’t bump threads…): Just remembered this nice free pack from Airwindows, fireworks sounds for convolution use: https://www.airwindows.com/fireworks-reverbs/

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#43

This link needs to be in this thread for archival purposes:

https://fokkie.home.xs4all.nl/IR.htm

Many free IRs here.

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#44

OK I put it up as a secret sneak preview just for us lines people… this is the Reaper tone generator plugin played live thru convolution reverb with a couple of different samples of concrete blocks scraping used as the impulse. Three recordings just quickly crossfaded together into 1 track, with a bit more conv reverb over the whole rendered track afterwards. Will further mix/edit and do something with it at some point :slight_smile:

Ah yes that’s a great one, thanks for the reminder. I love the abandoned factory PA, used that a lot over the years :slight_smile:

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All things drone
#45

My recent use of convolution reverbs has been in a software feedback chain, in this case using the Melda EZ Convolution, which has some great odd impulse responses under the “sound design” category. As the feedback is howling away, the elements in the chain are being modulated, including what impulse response to use.

I recorded some shorter sections, jammed with those and cut it up, which resulted in pieces like this:

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#46

nice! I also use the (free) Medla plugin, how do you modulate which impulse response is picked?

#47

I used Ppooll (for Max) for this one. The “modulator” object gives you a drop down list of all parameters that can be modulated, one of them just being “impulse response”. I haven’t tried it in a DAW yet.

#49

Hmm, I missed this thread but I love convolution as a technique.

A couple of my favorites IR packs:
The Threshold - abstract sounds for smearing the input
Unnatural Spaces - Really small spaces that add acoustic resonance to the input
Lo-Fi Impulse response pack - because sometimes you want your audio to sound like it’s coming out of a cheap tablet speaker

Beyond that, any noisy recording or sample.
I’ve recently played around with the audience applause at the end of concert recordings as an impulse. It’s tonally ambiguous, nicely textured, and sustained long enough to make a massive reverb.

I have wanted to get a decent recorder so that I can capture IRs of the stairwells around me, but as of now I don’t have any particularly good ones of my own to show for it.

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#50

A friend wants to make a recording sound like it’s coming through a massive speaker stack broadcasting across a body of water. Imagine you’re on the coast of an island and something’s playing at you from the mainland, or vice versa. He asked for my thoughts and it seems like convolution could really help, perhaps one round to emulate the source and one to emulate the effect of coming at you over the sea (not that I’m too sure what that would even do to a sound).

Anyone have any thoughts? Or links to promising IRs?

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#51

I can’t really offer any help on this, sorry. Just wanted to say that I live directly on the ocean, in a bay used for crabbing and depending on what the wind is like, I can hear the people out in the boats talking as if they were in the house, but in a different room. It really freaked me out at first, but now I’m used to it. In my experience, sound travels very weirdly across water.

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#52

Suspect there are two very different approaches - one is about making something ‘appear’ as described (sound system emulation with filtering & complex slap delays)… then there is the physics, which if modelled perfectly might be far less interesting/effective.

I did a ton of research for a film years ago and (ignoring the speaker stack for a moment) achieving realistic distance is incredibly complex. Apart from the speed of sound (over tidal water in your case) and the roll off of frequencies with distance, you also have to think about temperature and wind shearing, which contributes a kind of freq specific doppler/smearing effect… Near the sea, there is often wind… So is the sound travelling with the wind (carried by the wind) or against/muffled by it? Or a perfectly still day, with humidity? Its all variable with frequency… Nature, so complex.

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#53

Wild! (literally) Plenty to think about, thanks. I brought this up elsewhere too and someone rightly pointed out that a body of water is not going to be big on reflections in the same way an enclosed room is, so perhaps convolution is not that great an idea for the “across the water” aspect.

#55

You know your friend better than I do but I think it’s worth asking whether he means a sound he’s experienced (and can recall it) or whether it’s metaphorical.

There’s a lot you can do metaphorically with IR’s that might feel like a massive body of water, using the sounds of bubbles or waves crashing, etc.

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#56

I’m pondering a workflow for using the ER-301 to capture IR of my feedback loops. I would then pop the SD out of the ER-301 and into my Mungo c1 for longer-term use. Has anyone done similar (captured an IR of their synth)?

What is the ideal impulse to use? I am pondering using a very short burst of white noise, decay-only envelope, with varying decays.

#57

I’ve only recorded my own Ir’s once with the m4l convolution reverb pro but i have this pretty cool one from a hotel pool:

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#58

Technically you could make an IR of that scenario - put a large speaker stack on one side of a large body of water and a recording setup on the other, then play a sine sweep through the speakers.
(side note - you only really need one IR for this type of modelling, provided the sound source and recording device you use for the distance IR sound similar to what you want)

Unfortunately this has a couple of limitations: first the practical, given that it’s near impossible to achieve that setup and find a time without atmospheric noises getting into the IR. secondly the aesthetic, convolution is a linear process and will not capture any of the different forms of dynamic distortion or turbulence that occur in the system. In this case, any gradual sound changes made by waves, winds or even standing on different spots of the island won’t be reflected in the IR.

for something not convolution based there’s an old plugin called OutdoorVerb which tries to convey the very sparse echos of outdoor spaces - not sure if it would be useful at all but this seems like a good situation to try it.

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#59

I haven’t captured an IR of a synth but the general physics are similar between physical systems, hardware devices, and software chains.
There are 3 main ways to make IRs - which is better depends on the scenario.

  1. True Impulse - mainly for software, or hardware devices with audio line inputs - Create an audio file with the first sample at maximum value and everything else silent. Play this through your system and record the output. The output file is your IR.
  2. Realistic impulse - mainly for acoustic spaces or hardware - Make any sort of quick, loud, sound that fills the frequency spectrum as evenly as possible, and recording the resulting echos. Options include noise bursts, starter pistols, hand claps, etc… just be aware that your choice of impulse sound WILL color the output.
  3. Sine Sweep - mainly for acoustic spaces but it works everywhere - demonstrated here. it’s one of the most clean methods because it avoids most of the physical limitations of your sound source’s ability to produce every frequency at one instant in time.
  • bonus: you can do the same deconvolution process with other sources than a sine sweep! However, the sine sweep is still one of the most reliable sources.

If you are going for cleanliness, always lean towards the Sine Sweep - record the dry sweep, then record the sweep through your system, then deconvolve using software. If a fully accurate IR isn’t that important to you, then play around with different techniques and keep the IRs you like. It’s a creative process, after all!

final note - if the feedback loop in question involves some sort of distortion, compression, saturation, or other non-linear process, convolution won’t faithfully recreate the behavior of the system. That doesn’t mean you won’t get an interesting result though!

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#60

I’ve seen recently an ERC-1 demo, but it was not so good. How is your experience with the ERC-1? I would like to pick one to do sample and audio manipulation. Could you tell us your experience with it?