Recently we’ve been working on new movie and using Altiverb to place sound effects within their environment. What a great piece of software! There’s a new version 4 that’s recently come out.
Instead of grabbing all those sliders like Wet / Dry, Decay, and Pre-Delay and trying to find settings that sound like a real place, Altiverb actually takes the sonic characteristics of an environment and applies it to the sound. Using a starter pistol or a tone sweep to make some noise, and recording the sound inside a particular place like a church, a car, or your bedroom with one, two or four microphones, Altiverb will analyze that sound and make a church, car, or bedroom setting. This is called an Impulse Response. Then when you want to take a recording of something like someone singing and make it sound like it was done in the church, you selecting the “church” setting. Easy and very, very cool.
Altiverb ships with a lot of pre-set environments like various churches, cathedrals, music studios, auditoriums, and a whole slew of home and office places. You can download more from their website. And I’ve found a few other websites with other pre-sets that can be downloaded:
Fokke van Saane’s Altiverb Impulse Responses
And of course you can go and record your own!