Convolution is one of my favorite effects because you can make any sound interesting with it. Something worth mentioning and not explicitly said, but with convolution you can synthesize your own reverbs as well. With some noise and whatever effect you want you can make the craziest reverbs. For instance, one with automated bitcrush to have a sort of degrading tail.
It became my favorite effect too in only a matter of days. There's literally nothing you can slap on a convolver that wont sound interesting. I love recording random bits of videos (dialogue works particularly well) and put it over a drum loop. I gotta try your reverb trick aswell!
For those that felt a little lost on the definition of impulse response: I had this problem too through three different courses on control systems in college. It wasn't until years later that somebody gave me a wonderful explanation of what it is. You're basically hitting something with a hammer and describing what it does. The "impulse" being the hammer whack and the response being what this unknown thing does as a reaction.
One of the coolest way to make some very rich pads is to load pink or white noise in the convolution reverb and run any instrument through it. Most will sound really good, then is just a matter of applying some filtering to "mold" it better afterwards.
I absolutely love every video you make! Always so informative and inspiring. Seriously. I am moving away from making “trap,” because you have convinced me to express my true passion of making ambient soundscapes and just letting out all of my creativity. Even more so, I am trying to blend the two to see what I can create. Please don’t stop making music and videos!
Actually same man. I started with trap and found a love for Jazz music theory, vintage synths, and ambient music. I'll still make trap here and there but I enjoy making ambient music a lot more and want to learn how to create video game ambient soundscapes.
@@ivansoto9723 not that you asked for it! But if you love jazz theory, like I do, I recently took a huge step in my playing and production, by getting IRealpro, and playing jazz! And stealing ideas from the progressions I liked and making tracks out of them! Once you buy the app you can get the chords for literally 1400 jazz pieces, as well as hundreds of other songs from other tracks, It’s been really freeing to experiment with chord charts and focus on how to voice them in my own way :) Instead of constantly forcing myself to come up with something harmonically original EVERYTIME I SIT DOWN! It’s been a relief and a great way to practice all that theory knowledge I’ve been building up
I want to make ambient, and sacrificed a dream of making deathstep to do so. I have one demo and numerous failed attempts. Tuning convolution reverb for me is a nightmare.
I've been a lifelong musician and composer, but just learned how to program midi early last year. It's been such a fun ride learning all this stuff, and I've been hitting the music super hard for almost two years. This channel in particular has been a huge source of information, inspiration and humor. Thank your for your continued amazing work!
These uploads have been seriously awesome lately. Your "turning sound design into a career video" was amazing. Now we get this banger on top? This channel is so underrated.
Great video and well explained. I recently submerged three speakers [two bookshelves and one sub] in a pond, did an underwater IR, recording with two hydrophones. Now I can run stuff under water with my waves plugin. Caves, culverts, barns, suitcase, guitar and tubes I have also captured and documented on video. I love this process.
Wait.. And if the CMB is white noise the same way consciousness distorts beyond discernable thoughtforms when contemplating infinity and then blanks, one becomes "Snowblind" for a moment I'm possibly sounding like a Tool fan now
This video made clear a few things I didn't understand about using convolution appropriately. Suddenly it makes much more sense and using it is like magic. Adding tones, textures and space all in a way very friendly to experimentation. Thanks!
Awesome ideas. I like the idea of putting a drum loop through a chord sample. From a theory perspective any linear effect (like a delay or a filter) does a combination of delaying and attenuating (or amplifying) a frequency or set of frequencies. A convolution works by applying a delay and an attenuation/amplification to every frequency in the signal, separately. Therefore you can use a convolution to implement ANY linear effect (or set of linear effects), you just need to come up with the right IR. It can't do anything nonlinear (like saturation or compression) but otherwise it is an incredibly powerful tool.
That's not really a limitation! Anything non-linear you want to do, you can do either to the inputs or to the output! The "inputs" include both the signal and the IR, so you can pre-distort your IR, your signal both, or the convolved result, each with a different result.
@@bobdeadbeef You can definitely run one in serial with a nonlinear effect. But preprocessing the IR with a nonlinear effect will still result in a linear convolution, just a different linear convolution.
@@jamesperry1358 Right. What I'm trying to say is that convolution doesn't get in the way of anything nonlinear you'd like to do. So if you have compression C, and convolution f * g, you can do C(f) * g, f * C(g), or C(f * g). It's more of an advantage than a limitation. Nonlinear processes don't combine so nicely.
The video was a quarter over and I was still laughing at the intro 🤣 Also, that thing with the chord sounded awesome! Thanks for the super interesting and useful content.
Your intros are consistently so entirely hilarious. Gotta watch 'em like 5 times through to take it all in, there's so much to unpack. Oh, and very educational and interesting videos, too!
12:50 ---> You are sooo into BrianEno territory here... :-) Just brilliant ! Love this section/chapter. . This is one of the things I heard about in a podcast. You just store it as a; 'I gotta try that' ... and then you forget about it. Thanks for this reminder :-) . Thumbs up 👍.
This retroelectro producer loves anything that reminds me about reverb(s) and therefore I MONSTER LOVE this SUPERIOR tutorial. THANK YOU! Time to go shopping….
@@cooperlyle8781 any that fits for a rversing reeese. Maybe the same reesse could be that impulse. Have you tried kHs Convolver Tool? Yo ucan load anything as impulse.
@@cooperlyle8781 An impulse is a sample that could be veery short, and it's used to blend sounds. For example, when you have a cabinet emulator you have there different impulses recorded from different cabinets, so when you plug a guitar in that virtual cabinet, depending on the impulse you select, the timbre of the guitar sounds according to from where that impulse was taken.
Cameron! You are a family man, head of house hold, responsible and provider to others that depend of you, but most of all you’re an Artist from the heart. As an artist, it is common that you will have folks against you, for not liking your style of your art. Meaning that you will have followers, people that connect with you and cherish your passion. The subside of that is the people who don’t care for you as an artist, therefore, it funnels down to not liking you as a person. Why, the connection, who the heck knows? And you should careless!!!! What you feel, or felt, we all have felt. At a time and form or at another. Take a look at van Gough’s life, an artist consider a crazy man when alive, a geniuses when dead. That inspire others like him to continue with what they love no matter what. His life example gave us, “Starry, starry, nights”. The way, van Gough, was treated when alive, is the treatment to a thousand of other people!!!!! My advice, buddy!!! Give that situation, the attention that it deservers, no less, no more… Concentrate on things that matters, to you, amigo!!!
The fact that the plugin can handle convolution with such a long impulse response is impressive. Each source sample has to be multiplied with each response sample down the line, added to the output samples and then averaged in, which means that the number of operations on each output sample increases linearly with the length of the impulse response. Super cool that it can just chug through that without missing a beat.
My Favorites are: REVerence because it comes with Cubase^^ Audiothing Fog Convolver meldaproduction MPhatic, because it can restore the original dynamics. Voxengo Deconvolver, it is an easy and free tool to create your own response impulses with a sine-sweep or when you clap in a room, cave, wathever with a great reverb.
When I found out about convolution I was super hyped and wanted to put everything I had through it haha, definately a great sound design tool. Btw, for FL users there is the awesome fruity convolver and I believe the free melda pack also has a convolution plugin!
I personally reccomend more the free Convology XT , the fruity one it's fine but eh not that much , the Melda one it's good but I prefer the XT to be honest just because it looks great , you can do a lot of stuff with just one IR , plus you can import whatever wav file and turn it into an IR..I'm not so sure you can do that on the Melda one tho
@@TheGhostRecordsChannel it's as easy as drag and drop in Fruity convolver It has feedback, stretch, an in built eq with the spectrum of the imported file for reference. Pretty good
Thank you for this excellent video. I've been using convolution since it first appeared but you have reminded me that it really is a powerhouse for creativity 😊
Awesome vid! I have the KHS subscription for quite some time now and the possibilities with the entire package (MultiPass, SnapHeap, PhasePlant and the many plugins) are nothing short of endless. It can get really overwhelming so these vids that give pointers to applying certain modules to inspire creativity are most welcome. Thank you! 🙏
So I put smash mouth in a convultion reverb on a stock sytrus preset, it turned into an ambient pad. Added a drum break and a 808 and It's lowkey kinda fire.
Hi buddy, awesome content. I really enjoy your videos! Thank you! As a physicist and hobby musician I am so happy that here is actually a nice application of what we studied years ago. The Fourier transformation! Sorry guys, but I WANT to write these lines now: A Fourier transformation transformes a function from the frequency domain into the time domain, or vice versa*. What does that mean? Look at your DAW. The spectrum analyzer. It shows you the actual frequencies but what it "reads" are time dependent signals (functions), a mixure of different instruments and their overtones etc. So the analyzer is basically a Fourier transformer. Ok, still reading this comment? So, why using a sweep when creating an impuls response (guitar cabinet? For a good, real impuls response, you need a perfect impuls, a really high, narrow spike, a delta distribution or Dirac impuls to excite you system (amp^, speakers, mics, mic preamps). I would guess it's not easy to generate and maybe it would not be so nice for your eqipment. Whatever. Just a guess. So, the whole thing is done in the frequency domain, generating a pure sine sweep and record the systems frequency response, with all it's added characteristic rattles, hums, shimmers, etc. The - for example - Voxengo deconvolver (to create an impuls response to load in the convolver(both signals in the time domain) needs to do three things (I guess): 1. Fourier transform (FT, time to frequency) the test sweep signal to find out to which frequency the system is responding to and remember the time when this frequency was "excited". 2. go to the corresponding time in the recorded signal file and FT it (time to frq) it to calculate the frequency response (so basically have a look to the spectrum analyzer). We are still in the frequency domain. Now we know all frequency responses from 0Hz-20kHz(?). And then ... 3. perform another FT with all these frequency dependent informations and go back to the time domain. And there you have your short characteristic - click or clack or gligg or ... Maybe it helps, if you know that a perfect Dirac puls in time leads an absolutely equally distributed frequency spectrum. I don't know if you ever noticed that: If there is a rather loud crackle in your audio file, or a long constant tone ends, you see the whole frequency spectrum in your analyer rising up. Since the recorded cabinet spectrum response was obviously not equally distributed, you have not just a spike but a click like sound. Last step: This information is again convolved with your time dependent guitar+amp signal in real time. Meaning that your signal from the amp is smeared out, blurred, broadend, whatever, in the exact same way like a cabinet would do. Or - like presented here, you just convolve two signals. A snare hit with a door bell, what ever. What about deconvolving a signal just for fun... so, feeding a deconvolver with a sine sweep and a song track or a synth pad or drum loop. Hmmm ... lpsa.swarthmore.edu/Convolution/CI.html I selected the "very fast exp" as h(x) and the "1 sec Puls" as f(x). The "very fast exp", let's say it's your IR and the 1 sec puls is your signal... The same procedure is used to create reverb IR in cathedrals, famous studios, famous places ... Actually, each audio system has it's IR: The room, the mics, the console, the AD, the DA, the headphone amp, the headphones ... your eardrum. *In quantum mechanics it's usefull to convert functions from the momentum to the position space. ^Actually you don't want to capture the amp characteristics, so I guess that's why the studio guys would use a "linear" responding solid state amp. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-spUNpyF58BY.html lpsa.swarthmore.edu/Convolution/CI.html
Really interesting video, love your channel ! I bought the KHS Convolver as soon as it came out, awesome plugin ! Lot of sick impulses responses, like cabinets, glitches, filter formant.... And I love the fade in/out functions ! Cherry on the cake, really light on CPU :)
Excellent explanation! Very inspirational and educational. Thanks so much for your time and devotion to help us to understand this elusive and abstract concept. 👍
I've mapped out the trajectory of the increasing length and sophistication your intros, and I estimate that they will reach twenty-seven minutes of Nobel-Prize-Winning insight by 12 February 2024, :-)
Literally a minute or so into this & had to sub 😂🤚🏼 you’re hilarious! If you’re half as useful as you are funny gonna love this channel. Hope you’re well
I love messing around with Kefir, which is a free 1 second convolution reverb. Feeding different material into the convolver results in some really interesting etherial sound design
Your best video ever! Actually, the best sound design video ever! I've been meaning to play with doing convolution with non-spatial, non-filter impulse responses since forever. Well, since I learned about convolution almost 50 years ago as part of the EE side of my education. If I had realized it could be this interesting, I'd have jumped into it the first time I encountered a convolution reverb! To add to the irony, back then I was trying to design a digital synth/dedicated DAW. I was totally over my head, and it was too early for even the FM techniques I was trying (and I didn't know about Chowning's work, or I would have headed to Stanford and had a very different life!). Digital real-time convolution was FAR in the future. But in all that time, I assumed that playing with IRs this way would be weird (which can be good) but also not really controllable, in the way that FM can be hard to control, so I never put in the time. Embarrassingly wrong! So now I had the idea of using a table of convolutions and doing it wave table synthesis style, modifying the IR w/ time. Except-mathematically, you did that, when you put IR's in series! In fact, when I saw you do that, I thought, "why not pre-convolve them"-for about 200 ms, before I thought "what, and lose all that dynamic control?!!" You still might want to do that to save on CPU in some circumstances. Still, I think there's room for an actual wave-table approach, to allow for real-time modulation the way wave table synths do. So instead of just proceeding linearly through the variations from the 2nd IR, you can do things like sweep back and forth, or change the start point. The key here is that convolution is is commutative, associative, and distributive, so it doesn't matter which order we do them in, or whether we convolve each of two signals and add, or add two signals and convolve. So now you've tempted me to not just play around and make cool sounds, but maybe write my own plugin! EDIT: If anyone wants to steal the idea-by all means, go for it!
convolver is a magical plugin. i wanted to make a video about it too but it's not easy to put the spectrum of applications into short words. you did a good job at that
There's another great video by RU-vidr "Scruffy" on the sound effects of the Pikmin games that brings up convolution. He uses it to recreate an "alien goo" sound effect used by one of the bosses by running the sound of churning mud through a convolution reverb with an unnatural impulse response. Very interesting stuff; I'd recommend his channel, especially if you also like the analysis of sound design and adaptive audio in video games.
To actually (to math people) explain what this "convolution" is and what it has to do with the mathematical term "convolution": I think what "convolution" in audio production does is multiply together the frequency spectrum (Discrete Fourier Transform I guess) of the the two signals (the "input" and the "impulse response", but my interpretation, if true, implies that it doesn't actually matter which is which, as well as that they can actually be any two sound clips). The reason this is called "convolution" is because it's equivalent to the convolution of the audio signals themselves according to the "Convolution Theorem" which states: If f and g are two functions whose Fourier transforms exist and which are equal to the inverse Fourier transforms of their Fourier transforms, then the Fourier transform of their convolution is equal to the product of their Fourier transforms: i.e., For all real numbers x, FourierTransform[f*g](x) = FourierTransform[f](x)FourierTransform[g](x), where I use * for convolution and adjacency for multiplication. Technically, we need a version of this theorem that applies to discrete signals of finite length and discrete Fourier transforms rather than to functions from real numbers to real numbers. In any case, if you want to know what convolution is in mathematics, the page on Wikipedia named just "Convolution" is about this, and the 3Blue1Brown video actually focuses on discrete convolution. Wikipedia also discusses this Convolution Theorem, as does Wolfram MathWorld with a brief "proof".
Thanks for explaining all this. I was wondering how the pulsating reverb was done on the track 'Surkin - Tiger Rhythm' (famously used in an iPhone commercial). Impulse Response explains it all
When I will be passing to the other realm I wish I would hear your voice welcoming me in the outer life :) Btw, recording a new stuff for the channel and doing a laundry at the same time, masterpiece of multitasking :) Love your work! All the best!
If you are an Ableton user there is a FREE Max for Live device that also allows you to drag in any audio sample for an IR. I haven't messed with it much but I am about to dive headfirst now!
Hey Venus, off topic of the video but just curious. Do you happen to write music for tv shows? Every sound example you use in your vids sounds like it be good on a series with some intense scenes. Love your videos man. Keep up the good work 🤘🏻
This is great. Never occurred to me to use convolution reverbs in this way. iZotope Trash 2 has a convolver module that I never used because I figured what’s the point? Now I get it.
I love convolutions! Thanks for showing some good use cases. Any FIR ("linear phase") filter is also a convolution kernel. Very likely, the anti-aliasing filters in your DAC/ADC are also convolvers, although with shorter IRs. However, the main drawback is that they are, well, linear :-) Also, another fun tip: Using the "noise" and "piecewise linear" operators in the Nyquist prompt in Audacity, you can generate a large variety of interesting impulse responses to convolve with. Filtering the IRs is also sometimes interesting!
Love the intro! Experimenting with IRs has been on my list of stuff to check out for a while (it's a long list and I don't get round to most of it!). This was really informative, and has given me quite a few ideas, cheers.
