Real room impulse responses with EZX/SDXs

[i.m.w]

Hi all

I recently emailed Toontrack with the following suggestion, which they seemed to quite like and suggested that I post here for other users to comment on. So, if you like the idea or have comments/suggestions, please post away!

My suggestion was that they include within each EZX/SDX expansion pack a handful of impulse responses recorded in the same live room as the drum samples. That way, if you are looking to place other instruments (vocals, horns, piano, whatever) in the same acoustic ‘space’ as the drums, it would be easy to do so using the provided impulse responses and a convolution reverb plugin. Even if you end up wanting to put a larger artificial reverb on, say, the vocals, this could still be a really effective way of providing all the instruments in a mix with a little of the same acoustic character – potentially very useful if you are looking to use the sampled drums as the basis for recreating a ‘live band’ type of recording.

Studio engineers often have ‘go to’ positions in their live rooms for recording specific instruments – positions which they know from experience will work well and give the right sort of ambience. A set of impulse responses could be created with the sound source placed at these same positions, and microphones placed both nearby (where the engineer might typically place the microphone for recording that instrument) and further away to capture more of the natural room reverberation.

Would other members find this as useful as I would?

Cheers

Ian

Topic

[Ian Scott]

I think this is a great idea. It would be great to have impulse responses from all of the Studios that have been used. Some of them are not in existence anymore.

[Juicy]

If some I.R’s are made from single Starter pistol or clapper “hits,although a full sine sweep maybe better.
I wonder why then a snare or Kik hit in these great rooms cannot give us an IR already.
Maybe we already have what we need to do this ?

[i.m.w]

Certainly an interesting question, although I suspect that it wouldn’t work very well, unfortunately.

I think you could probably make it sound reasonably natural taking the late reverberation from, say, a snare drum hit in one room and adding it to a snare drum hit recorded in a less reverberant room (in fact, I think I remember hearing that something like this was done for some of the presets for the Custom and Vintage SDX).

But if you wanted to derive an impulse response that could be applied to other sources, such as vocals, then I don’t think this approach would cut it. The sound of even a snare drum is far more complex than a true impulse (it rings, it has a non-flat frequency response, etc) – if it was just like an impulse, people wouldn’t get nearly so excited about vintage Ludwig snares! The problem is that you have no way of separating out the response of the drum from the response of the ‘room’. Starter pistols, balloon-bursts, etc are better (though still not ideal) in that they more closely resemble a pure impulse.

On the plus side, as most professional studios have very low ambient noise levels, recording really high quality IRs should be relatively straightforward using either a swept-sine or maximum-length-sequence method.

Best wishes

Ian

[Juicy]

Understood , i am sure you have a better understanding of it.

I thought the IR’s are partly calculated and in that way we’re able to use very simple starting points that are useable on other material not just similar to the original sound,even a lush vocal reverb but sounds not to be the case.

The idea has been mentioned a few times now and i think most all of us would be very happy to have IR’s of fantastic rooms used for these drums

[i.m.w]

Ah, sorry. Classic case of being new to the forum and not having checked to see whether it had already been mentioned in the past…

You’re right in that once you have the clean impulse response of the room, you can then apply it to any sound source that you choose, including vocals. But to get the impulse response in the first place, you need to either generate an impulse in the room (from a starter pistol, clapper board, etc) and record the response, or play back a carefully designed test signal (e.g. swept sine) that you can later cancel out of the recorded signal to obtain the pure response of the room.

So I think that in order to provide this facility Toontrack would have to revisit the studios, unless they happened to record impulse responses at the time of the original sessions. That said, if someone is able to obtain useful impulse responses from the existing drum samples, then I would be very glad to be proved wrong!

Cheers

Ian

[Whitten]

I could be wrong, but I think there is resistance from many studios to having their rooms sampled.
Already, the best studios realise the value of their sound to sample producers and have either done exclusive deals, eg with Native Instruments ‘Abbey Road, or Ilio ‘Oceanway’, or will ask for detailed explanation on what you are planning to sample before they will agree to book the session.
As regular recording dies a slow death, both celebrity drummers and well known studios are realising the power they hold with their signature sounds.
That’s why you rarely see products like Steve Gadd at Electriclady Studios.

[Juicy]

Yes,
Or Bernard Purdie anywhere he likes.

Altiverb 7 has a way to place people on stage of any IR front to back,left to right.
You can put the singer up front and place band members around and behind.
It kinda blew me away when i first heard it. V expensive though.

[Martin]

ORIGINAL: Whitten

I could be wrong, but I think there is resistance from many studios to having their rooms sampled.

You are not wrong.

Martin Kristoffersson
Sound Designer

[optofonik]

ORIGINAL: Martin

ORIGINAL: Whitten

I could be wrong, but I think there is resistance from many studios to having their rooms sampled.

You are not wrong.

Makes a lot of sense. Maybe seeking out studios or rooms that are being mothballed would be a partial answer? I like the concept of saving a studio’s sound for posterity if nothing else.

Ultimately, it appears that EZConvolutionReverb will remain wishful thinking.

"Let us wander through a great modern city with our ears more attentive than our eyes..."

Luigi Russolo, 1913

[mprinz]

Ahhhhhh, ok! That makes sense!

🙁 Damn it!

[mprinz]

Sorry, guys. I am 10 year to late but the problem remains.

Even just to add instruments from another library will be nice with the possibilty to have IRs.

I mean, anyway I have kick, snare, toms, cymbals. That covers the whole frequency spectrum.

Anyone who knows a way to deconvolve the IR from the samples?

[Author]

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