Singing Potatoes
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next
Thursday, 23 September 2004
Oooooo!

Warning: audio geekery ahead.

I've been meaning to try SIR, a freeware impulse response convolver, for a while. Last night, unhappy with the reverb on one of my songs, I decided to give it a shot. I wish I'd checked it out sooner.

Basically, it's a really nifty way of producing realistic reverbs. A sharp broadband noise (such as a starter pistol or gunpowder-charge nailgun) is recorded in a real space (auditorium, stadium, studio room, etc.), and the convolver uses the waveform of the recording to reproduce the characteristics of the space's reverberation and decay. By recording impulses from various points around the space, you can even produce an accurate surround-sound reverb.

And it sounds fantastic. None of the reverbs I have were giving me quite what I wanted, but an impulse from an 1800-seat auditorium was precisely what I was looking for. And it doesn't emphasize sibilance like the Lexicon Pantheon does, my only real complaint with that one.

It's a bit of a CPU hog — I had to increase my latency to about 23 msec in order to prevent dropouts, and the CPU's still hovering at about 75% for only five tracks (versus about 33% without it). But for a free plugin, it's pretty darned amazing.

Posted by godfrey (link)
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next