[TBman]

Originally Posted by Aimelie

“Impulse response”, I do believe.

Originally Posted by Doug Young

Impulse response, Barry. It's a way of capturing the sonic signature of one sound so you can apply it to another. It's heavily used in reverbs - capture the sound of the Sistine Chapel, or someone's bathroom, whatever, and be able to apply it as a reverb on your own track. The reverbs are often called "convolution reverbs", because convolution is the process of applying an IR to another sound. You have a convolution reverb in Reaper, from what I understand. So all you do is load it up with an IR and use it like any effect.

A "recent" (as in the last 20 years or so) area of exploration has been using this technique to capture the acoustic sound of a guitar and apply it to a pickup. Momma Bear, ToneDexter, Aura, and Baggs Voiceprint are hardware devices that do this. Cuki and JonFields here on AGF have written software that let you capture your own IRs as well. The electric players have been into this longer, and things like the Kemper amp and AxeFX and others let you reproduce the sound of virtually any electric amp using a captured IR. If you read the amplification section of AGF, for the past severals years, every few threads are about IRs, so you can dig into all the details by reading that section of the forum.

My take on IRs applied to pickups is that they have progressed to where they're a game changer for live amplification, but are less likely to fool anyone for a recording. The sample I posted earlier (labeled "reverb test") is using an IR on my pickup.

Originally Posted by S.bowman

Impulse Response. A sonic measurment of a room (or any space), a speaker cabinet in relation to the sound source. There are a few IR loaders out there for free which allow you to load a chosen IR, and use it for live or recording purposes. I prefer to use a convolution plugin in my DAW for that purpose, as the free ir loaders I have used cut the length of the IR to fit, where-as the plugin does not. If you use Logic Pro X, you can load IR's into Space Designer . If using Reaper, I think REAverb is their convolution plugin.( if you decide to try it, be sure that you turn the wet signal to 100%, and dry to zero. It isn't limited to profiles of acoustic guitars and speaker cabinets, you can load some pretty sweet rooms IR's in there that you wouldn't have real world access too as well.
Hope that helped you to understand a bit better. Stuff had me confused when I first started learning about it, but they are not difficult to use at all once you learn a little about them. Very useful for electric guitar stuff when you can't plug a 100 water into a 4-12 without making the neighbors hate you.

Thanks! I'll play around with this!