No problem. What about beneath a glacier? You can even create your own impulse responses with the use of a starter gun or sine wave sweep played through speakers paired with either one or two microphones.
For the guitarist and bassist in the digital realm, you can use impulse responses of amp and cab combos to alter the tone of your playing after the fact. For producers, convolution reverb is great for adding depth to a track and creating a wide variety of tonal shaping. Hitsville U. They would commonly run their hand claps through this setup but can be heard on many other parts of their music. Unsurprisingly, convolution reverb is used a lot in film production, with sound engineers often recording impulse responses of film sets and locations so that the sound FX wizards can accurately add sounds in post production—or, as is so unfortunately common these days, adding realism to scenes created entirely with CGI and green screens.
One great example of this is in the movie A Star Is Born, where the band recorded live between sets at Coachella and other festivals but played un-amplified to the crowd. Only using a handful of reads and writes in a delay loop cannot generate a convincing reverberation due to audible repetitions and resonances that quickly emerge.
The process needs thickening and blurring to suppress resonances from building up, so modulation is used to solve this problem. Modulation in reverberant environments is not something we are traditionally used to hearing because real rooms would have no perceptible time-based variability in them unless the room is physically changing.
Any movement of air or people within a room is typically imperceptible. The modulation of classic reverb devices has, however, become something we expect to hear in reverbs used for music as it is psychoacoustically very satisfying.
It helps synthetic reverb blend with its source and gives a reverb tail a lush organic quality. Registration number Cookies Policy Privacy Policy. Hit enter to search or ESC to close. What Is Convolution Reverb? A Reverb primer There are five basic types of reverb used in music production. Physical modeling synths aim to replicate the sound of an event like a string pluck, drum hit, or air blowing through a wind instrument, by mathematically recreating the physics of how those sounds are made within the instrument.
Convolution, however, is not generative and occurs by processing audio rather than synthesizing it. The two processes could be used in tandem. While convolution reverbs generally require the impulse to be removed from an impulse response, convolution, in general, can be performed using anything as the impulse response. Because of this, we can use a physical modeling synthesizer to create an interesting timbre that will eventually be used as an impulse response in convolution.
Listen to the acoustic guitar loop we used in the previous example, now convolved with the sound I created in the physical modelling synth:. Keep in mind that impulse responses can be any audio clip whatsoever, and do not have to necessarily be recorded or created using physical modeling. It has access to plenty of impulse response presets and the ability to import your own. NI Kontakt actually has a built-in convolve instrument effect.
Simply drag an audio file into the plug-in window to be used as an impulse response. The rest of the plug-in functions as a convolution reverb, splitting the impulse response into early and late reflections. These can be separately filtered and sized, and other reverb parameters like predelay are adjustable. It has a TON of preset impulse responses, including those for plenty of famous spaces.
In each impulse response, Altiverb allows customizable reverb settings, including decay time, EQ and dampening for different frequencies, time domain controls like pre-delay, and stereo positioning.
Its ergonomic UI displays all of these settings clearly. The possibilities of convolution are actually endless, as any sound can be used as either an input signal or an impulse response. In sound design, this is an invaluable asset to creating new sounds, as timbres can be intentionally chosen and recorded for the purposes you see fit.
In a standard processing mindset, convolution reverbs generally sound great. The spaces available in these plug-ins are modeled after some of the most perfectly-designed acoustic spaces in the world. With the ability to create life-like spacial effects, convolution reverb also has incredible potential for creating believable spaces in music and sound for film and video games.
The realistic reverb spaces can help to completely immerse a viewer or player in the experience. The only real downside of convolution is that it can be a bit of a CPU-hungry process. High-powered convolution plug-ins can especially hit your computer hard, so are often better used as send effects. This allows you to use fewer instances of the plug-in in the project and keep your reverb spaces consistent in your mix.
Additionally, convolution reverbs can be more taxing on your computer than standard reverb plug-ins are. However, the textural options available through convolution and its hyper-realistic reverb spaces make it a valuable tool in both sound design and standard processing.
And if you get into recording your own impulse responses, this brings a new layer to your convolution process. With its availability and potential, convolution is definitely a technique you should familiarize yourself with and put it into action to add depth to your sound.
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