I co-founded Soundwoofer in 2018 with a fairly straightforward idea: make the sound of expensive recording equipment available to anyone.
Soundwoofer uses impulse responses captured from speaker cabinets, microphones and recording environments. These allow musicians, producers and hobbyists to reproduce characteristics of those recording setups digitally, without owning all of the original equipment.
I am no longer involved in Soundwoofer. This page documents the project and what we built during my time there.
Here is a short demonstration of what that sounds like:
What is an Impulse response and how can it change the music industry?
An impulse response is, essentially, a digital capture of how a system changes a sound.
In Soundwoofer’s case, that meant capturing the acoustic characteristics of speaker cabinets, microphones, microphone positions and recording environments.
Load that capture into compatible software and you can apply those characteristics to another signal.
Or, in less technical terms:
You can record a guitar at home and make it behave as if it had been recorded through a completely different cabinet and microphone setup.
What does this mean for musicians or anyone who produces music?
That was the part that interested us.
A traditional guitar-recording setup can get expensive very quickly. Different amplifiers, speaker cabinets, microphones, preamps and recording rooms all affect the final sound.
Impulse responses let you separate some of that sound from the physical equipment.
During my time with Soundwoofer, we built a library of those captures so musicians could experiment with different recording setups without needing to own every piece of equipment themselves.
A guitar, an audio interface, a computer and a DAW could get you surprisingly far.
Why did we build it?
Because access to equipment should not determine whether someone gets to experiment with good sounds.
Not everyone has a room full of cabinets and microphones.
Not everyone has access to a professional studio.
But almost anyone producing music digitally can load a .wav file.
Soundwoofer was built around making those sounds easier to access and share.
How did we record the impulse responses?
We sent an impulse sweep through a guitar or bass speaker cabinet and recorded the result using different microphones and microphone positions.
The recording was then processed using deconvolution to extract the impulse response of that setup.
The resulting .wav file captured characteristics of the speaker cabinet, microphone, microphone position and recording environment represented in the measurement.
Those files could then be loaded into an impulse-response loader and used inside a digital recording setup.
The video below shows part of that process.
How do you get started, step-by-step?
Step 1: Go to Soundwoofer and select one(or several) Impulse responses you like
Step 2: Fire up your D.A.W (Logic, Cubase, whatever)
Step 3: Load the .wav file into your Impulse loader (If you don’t have one, you can google, there are tons of them for free)
Step 4: Send the input from your guitar/bass through the impulse response
Step 5: Voilá!