Soundwoofer is a library where you can download free Impulse responses from guitar and bass cabinets.

There are three sections in the library;

• Standalone impulses - An Impulse with a plain text description

• Impulse responses attached to a rig

• Mixpulses - are combinations of several microphones into just one single file.

If you need help to get started with using Impulse responses, there is a guide for you here

Here is a top 20 list

 

That's great, thank you.

 

Congratulations, cool project!

You probably have your hands full, but it'd be dope if you add another tutorial about creating IRs via Eq-matching. Not only for for cab-simulation but for guitars.

It's something many people doesn't know when trying to match a tone with IRs. The dry guitar tone is the first thing to be emulated and when you have a close (guitar/pickups) one an IR is enough.

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2020

Talked to the studio guy among us and we added writing up a tutorial on this subject to our "to-do" list.
Thanks for the tip.

 

This is interesting!
What's your business model? Is it a community driven project or is it gonna be part of a future commercial product?
And what else are going to offer aside from guitar IRs?

 

The library in itself is meant to be open-source (well, it is, we support registration and uploads) and will always be available to the public domain.

We are working on some other stuff that will work together with the library and those will be commercial products.

Edit; We already have a bunch of bass IR:s, including this Mesa powerhouse 8x10. Technically we have the foundation to support alot of stuff, we just decided to focus on speaker cabinet IR:s and master that domain first.

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2020

As a web developer myself I dig your site's technical part though I can't see the guts. But I can guess seeing the rigs/bundles that a solid database design is under the hood.

I'm more of a back-end one but I can see a nice job using the WebAudio API too.

It turns out I'm also a metal-head, we love to play with cabinet IRs. So marketing-wise good choice of your first type of product

 

Why thank you.

At the core there is a neat little relational database

 

nice collection.
thanks.

 

That's what I guessed.

Do you plan to add other free but less documented IR libraries? The classics Catharsys and so on.

 

Check out the "Standalone impulse responses" section.
There it is just plain text attached to a .wav file

 

Sweet. You uploaded the best ones. Good job.

If I may, the only problem I see is that the rig section only has the cabinet IRs. The rest is a large combination of hardware that obviously, few people has.
It's still very interesting (watched the videos) but a person not familiar with IRs may easily get confused.

 

Last edited: Mar 25, 2020

Not entirely sure I follow, could you rephrase that?

 

Ok. Keep in mind I love the site and is the only thing that perhaps could be improved for clarification.

When you see the rigs they include guitar rig parts like a Peavey amp.
But you only can emulate the cabinet with the IRs. Not the amp-head.
This could lead to someone to think they can emulate the entire rig with the IRs. Although not for long of course.
More like a classification/clarification possible improvement, because still it's interesting to have the rigs data.

For example, something I wondered myself: do the test sounds (clean, metal, jazz) include the rig recording besides the cab IR effect applied at the end?
I guess they don't, that would be huge bandwidth usage.

 

Last edited: Mar 25, 2020

Ahhh, gotcha. No the reason we bring that up is because we noticed that there is some coloration from whatever drives the cab.

No, the samples are just dry signals that we do convolution with. So one sample.

 

Sample player upgrade

Soundwoofers' impulse response library have a built-in sample player, a feature that allows users to listen to the IR:s in action, live in their browser.



This player has just received a major upgrade, registered users can now upload their sample to the player, play it trough the impulses directly in the browser and find impulse responses that sound good for their specific track.

Getting started

Keep in mind that the samples uploaded to the library must be recorded in a special way (without a cabinet), here is a guide on how to do that.

Custom samples are uploaded (or replaced) in the profile page.



After which the custom sample is available in the 'Select genre'-dropdown list and users can go hunting for the sound that suits their needs.

Register a free account here

 

A little video we produced where we let some musicians and producers A/B-test their cabinet vs impulse responses we made from them.

The individual episodes in the impulse response reaction series can be found here

 

We teamed up with Italian producer Mad Steex and created a bunch of impulse response mixes.

The mixes are built from the following cabinets and microphones

Cabinets
David Laboga K100
David Laboga V30
Orange 412 G12T75
Orange 412 V30 Royer

Microphones
SE Electronics Ribbon R1
Lauten Audio LA220
Lauten Audio LA120
AKG414
Royer R121

Link to blog post with more information and links to download the impulse responses

 

Thanks for sharing this great resource Soundwoofer. Very appreciated

 

We improved our guide on how to record an impulse response.
It now also features three step-by-step guides and pretty pictures

How to record an impulse response with;

1. Sine sweep method - Voxengo deconvolver - Windows
   
2. Sine sweep method - Logic pro's space designer - Mac
3. (White/pink) Noise burst - Any operating system