[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

[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

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