Soundwoofer is a project developed for musicians out there who would like to contribute to the music sector. It is a collaborative project prepared to offer downloading thousands of impulse responses, generally known as IRs online. There are various problems in the world of music, and atleast one can be fixed with Soundwoofer.
As an outline, they have built a free resource for musicians that will allow them to recreate a perfect studio sound from their home. In technical terms, they have developed an impulse response library available to the public domain. The impulse responses (IRs) provided by Soundwoofer are recorded so that the input signal only requires the Guitar/Bass Guitar together with a pre amp, and the impulse response replaces the cabinet. The pre-amp can both be digital and an actual physical pre-amp.
What is an impulse response?
To understand the term better, let’s break it down in half. Impulse means a very short sharp noise, a perfect click, and a transient. Secondly, the reaction generated from the impulse is called Response in IRs. Let’s take an example: if you are sitting in a Cathedral and clap, the first click of your hands is impulse, and the echo it generates after that is the response. Collecting that bit is a best practice to capture the reverb of a room. An impulse response of a linear time-invariant system contains how your signal gets filtered and processed by that system. When you capture the IR of a system and apply it to your track, the track will sound as if it was run through the original order.
How is the Impulse Response created?
Impulse responses in Soundwoofer are created by sending a test signal through your audio chain recording the output and having the software performance operation known as deconvolution. Keeping it simple, the process basically computes the difference between the test signal and the one that was run through your audio chain and then recorded and rendered in a file called impulse response.
Usage of an Impulse Response
Using an impulse response, we can shape the sound that we have got using an amplifier and develop it the way we want. This is great if you are a kind of guitarist or musician that really likes to tweak the sound or if you’re going to get your preferred bass sound. Subsequently, you can send the music over to a mixer or engineer to shape the sound the way it works inside a mix in the scope of the song you work with. impulse response and impulse response loaders do a massive array of options when it comes to your sound.
Here are couples of benefits we would like to share on impulse response:
The best approach to the costly signal chain
One thing that all musicians know and struggle with is the cost of gear. It is a fun but expensive rabbithole to dive into. Using impulse responses gives you the benefit of being able to quickly swap between countless cabinets at the click of a button, which saves a big bunch of time, money and experience.
Practical Acoustic Spaces at the fingertip
Impulse response provides effective choices of transonic flavors. If you are a musician engaged with Opera reverb, then IR and its tools like fork make it happen. IRs are useful for any scene from the bathroom to the hall, and it accurately creates natural Acoustic Spaces in any situation.
Superior tones for Live Performance
Using an impulse response in live performances furnishes the sound overall. With an IR, being a victim of stage-bleed is removed, The technique can reduce your effort with the placement of the microphone and ensures that you get a consistent stage sound every time.
Resourceful digital collection
Download your preferred IR from our collection, and with the IR technology, you can manage the entire setup like Microphone, Speaker cabinets into a single digital format. The collection is then suitable to use anywhere you perform.
No heavy-lifting with impulse response
Recall your previous tour with all heavy lifts you have to carry wherever you go, and even your studio is not well managed. With an IR, all you require is a hard drive.
Cut-down the budget
As mentioned before, Like many other folks engaged in the music industry, you may not have enough budget to purchase all of those fancy music items. Alternatively, the solution can be IR, which is comparatively inexpensive.
How to use an impulse response?
You can apply impulse response to your track using plugins called impulse loaders. They are straightforward plugins that insert on your after the amp scene, then browse to the folder you have your impulse response selected and downloaded from Soundwoofer. Impulse loader along with impulse response and your audio signal combined to do an operation called Convolution. The process applies the whole impulse response to each specific sample to your audio stream, and the output will be something like your signal running through the particular system in which you captured the IR. If you didn’t know about impulse response in your system, that’s because your stream already contains a new scheme in a cabinet section, and they are turned on by default. You can go to the cabinet section and bypass the whole thing. Similarly, you have to run external IRs like those provided by Soundwoofer; otherwise, it will be like running your guitar signal through two cabinets one after the other, which will result in heavily filtered and unrealistic sound. The three steps to use impulse responses;
Step 1: Choose your amp sim.
Step 2: Bypass the cabinet section.
Step 3: Load your impulse response (IR)
You would not need a substantial amount to buy luxurious amp speakers and only require a guitar, Pc or Laptop, and of course, an artifact to work with audio; with IRs, it’s a lot more economical. We hope this clears it up, and hopefully, you will be able to improve your guitar tone by finding the perfect IR in our library for the sound you want. Find more information on the topic on the Soundwoofer blog.
