(Music playing)

We are going to continue operating on the same clip so I am just going to move down here to my history panel and undo all the way back to the point which I normalized. Soundbooth offers two effects 2 effects whose primary purpose is to add a feeling of space or openness to your sound.

First and foremost we have the convolution reverb. Reverb is that big empty space sound you get when you are In a cathedral, or that bright tight tale you get when you are in a small concrete room. It is the pleasant warm ring produced by a good concert hall. Technically, it is the interaction among the sounds present in an environment, and the environment itself.

The whole concept behind a convolution is the attempt to sonically model a specific space allowing the user to change the parameters of the actual room being modeled in addition to the more commonly available reverb settings. The design of Soundbooth’s convolution reverb is centered around choosing an appropriate space, and then twicking that space’s parameters to fine tune the effect. The Soundbooth term for space in this sense is impulse. Let us explore this convolution reverb a little further.

I will go ahead and pull down the effect preset menu, and we will choose one of these presets available to us. How about back of the class? That sounds interesting. Let us open up our settings dialog and take a listen to what this sounds like when applied to the audio.

(Demo)

That is a pretty extreme reverb effect. It is not really a bad tone, but there is just way too much of it that has been applied to the audio. This is where our actual tweeks here of the sliders can come into play. Up at the top of the dialog box, we can see the menu where you select the desired impulse for the reverb. The choices are quite varied, living rooms, showers, caverns, concert halls, and the like. Feel free to do a little exploring and find the ones that work best for you. We are going to leave this at classroom.

The load button allows you to import custom made or commercially available impulse files. The mix slider is a very important one. It blends the reverb with the original dry signal. Dragging it all the way to the left creates a fully dry, that is to say unaffected sound. Where as dragging it all the way to the right, cuts all of the dry signal out, and all you hear is the reverb. Let us listen to one of those.

(Demo)

Reverbs typically sound bassed when the mix is set fairly low, somewhere between 10 and 20%. Let us get a decent setting for our mix slider.

(Demo)

Room size, as you might expect, changes the physical size of the space being modeled. This slider appropriately affects the tone and length of the reverb for each given impulse. Being a very processor intensive calculation, you actually need to stop playback of your audio when making adjustments to the room size slider, because it will interrupt the playback if you just try to drag the slider with the audio playing. Let us take a listen to what room size does.

(Demo)

You can hear how tight and short that reverb trail is. Now let us crank it all the way up, and take another listen.

(Demo)

You can clearly hear that there is a bit longer reverb tail, and it sound a little bit more extreme. I am going to keep the room size setting to right about where it was, which was roughly 52%. The damping sliders attenuate low and high frequencies, in fact that is what the LF and HF means. It is low frequencies and high frequencies. Attenuating high frequencies will tend to warm the sound up, in attenuating the low frequencies will tend to reduce muddiness, and make the reverb less woofy. Keep in mind that these damping settings do not affect the dry signal. They affect only the reverberations.

Pre-delay determines how quickly it takes the reverb to build up to full intensity. Shorter settings sound more realistic, while longer settings tend to create a more extreme, sometimes even cartoonish exaggerated reverb sound. Let us hear.

(Demo)

You can hear it sounds like he is in a much larger, more cavernous type of space with the pre-delay