Impulse Response (IR) Libraries

Colin Cartmell’s decades‑long tonequest has led him to create some of the best guitar cabinet IRs out there — so we asked him for advice on how to roll your own.

DP's ProVerb offers an easy way to experiment with guitar amp impulse responses.

There are some stunningly good Libraries for Acustica Audio's Nebula dynamic convolution plug-in, but you can also create your own. We invited one of the best Nebula developers to tell you how.

When is a reverb not a reverb? When it's a filter, of course! There's more to convolution than meets the ear, and creative processing of impulse responses can yield extraordinary results.

These audio files accompany the Creative Convolution: New Sounds From Impulse Responses article.

In SOUND ON SOUND September 2010s printed magazine (and digital editions), we introduced some innovative methods of recording and processing impulse responses. But if you know how to use a program like MATLAB, you can even generate them from scratch.

Convolution is the technology du jour for creating convincing reverbs, and if you're a Logic Studio bundle owner, you already have a utility that will let you get into it yourself, by creating custom impulse responses for the Space Designer plug-in.

Although convolution is often associated with high-end reverb processing, this technology makes many other new sounds available to you once you understand how it works.