
Suddenly, you can hear the overtones shimmering and everything washes together like a synth pad.
#CONVOLUTION SOUNDHACK PATCH#
You can break out a bizarre sound as your impulse response and achieve surprising sounds from the same French horn patch by tweaking the signal mix so that there’s significantly more of the wet signal than the dry - that is, more of the “reverb” sound than the original - and seeing what happens: This means that instead of just the basic impulse response of a concert hall… Since there is no rule that says you must use a specifically engineered impulse response in the plugin, commercial vendors have recently been catching on to the fact that, for the most part, you can load any standard. But we want to take the process even further off the beaten path to explore its potential for designing ambient sounds, so without further ado: Crafting a Convoluted Ambience Organic Sources The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

This often-overlooked fact allows for endless creative potential: you can record your own impulse responses and use them to give your music a distinctly personal sound. How would a symphony sound playing inside your piano? How about a brass quintet sitting in your flower pot? Or underwater?

Because you can capture the sound of virtually any physical space, convolution reverb allows you to digitally produce sonic environments that are simply impossible to create in the real world. And there’s more to it than meets the eye… Beyond Reverbĭespite its usefulness in creating a realistic mix, convolution reverb plugins are also extremely versatile tools for unconventional sound processing. This would allow you to go from an unprocessed, or dry, French horn sound:Īnd as the images indicate (this is simply Kontakt’s built-in convolution effect, nothing fancy), all we did was load up a basic concert hall impulse response! Perhaps the best part about this system is that most major DAWs and samplers come with their own built-in convolution reverb effects, so chances are you already have everything you need to make use of it. Most readers will be familiar with this basic usage of convolution reverb and will use several standard impulse responses to replicate the acoustics of a concert hall (for instance). Once you pass a signal through the plugin, it uses the impulse response to attempt a convincing recreation of the way the sound would behave in the given chamber.

The waveforms typically look like the one below, with a strong attack at beginning and then a sloping decay as the echoes die out. For everyone else, the term refers to a specific type of reverb plugin that makes use of so-called impulse responses to precisely replicate the sonic behavior of echoes in a particular space.Īn impulse response is typically a recording of a gunshot, a sine sweep, or a similar basic sound from which the convolution plugin can then extrapolate all the information it needs. It seems safe to assume that most folks with an interest in digital music production will have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of convolution reverb.

In this tutorial, we’ll examine one of the most flexible and accessible methods for producing compelling ambient sounds to use in your compositions: by using convolution reverb as a sound design tool. Working in today’s film and game audio environment nearly guarantees you many opportunities to produce interesting and evocative soundscapes, but while working from pre-made synth patches is great for folks in a hurry, it pays to sit down and craft something by hand whenever possible.
