Craig Anderton - Surreal Reverb Impulse Responses

There are plenty of reverb impulse responses (IRs) based on acoustical spaces, hardware reverbs, and the like—but the Surreal Reverb IRs are not from the physical world. Based on synthesized, stereo impulses fabricated from de-correlated noise, digital filtering, and amplitude shaping, the Surreal Reverb Impulse Responses are to reverb as CGI is to graphics—smooth, distinctive, and surreal, with no flutter and an idealized sound quality.

These innovative IRs are designed and tested for full compatibility with Studio One’s Open AIR convolution reverb. However, they also work with any convolution reverb plug-in or hardware (with sufficient memory) that accepts 44.1 kHz/24-bit WAV files. The four different reverb groups offer very different possibilities.

Idealized Reverb Impulses

The heart of this package is 60 Idealized Reverbs with 12 different characters: Balanced, Bassy, Bright, Damped, Distant, Fat, Midrange, Muffled, Resonant, Stable, Thin, and Thinner. Each character has a choice of five decay times, from 0.25 seconds up to about 8.00 seconds.

Reverse Reverb Impulses

55 Reverse Reverb impulses are based on the Idealized Reverbs, but tailored specifically for reverse reverb effects. They’re particularly effective for drums, percussion, and sound design, but can also add an otherworldly quality to vocals and instruments like guitar, strings, and brass.

Vocal Reverb Impulses

Although all the reverbs are suitable for voice, these 8 impulses are optimized with fast damping, and range from 150 ms decay to 8 seconds decay.

Predelay Reverb Impulses

Although you can add pre-delay to any of the reverbs using Open AIR’s Predelay control, these five impulses are optimized for use with drums. The decay times are extra short, short, medium, long, and extra long.

To hear what makes these impulses unique, please listen to the audio examples (see descriptions of the examples below). For an in-depth tour, the four-minute video gives some background on the impulses, and includes the audio examples within the video.

The bottom line is simple: When you need reverb that other reverbs don’t do, you need Surreal Reverb Impulse Responses.

Surreal Reverb Impulse Responses Audio/Video Demo

Audio Examples

All audio examples use a 50/50 wet/dry mix

[1 Decay Evaluation]

Short, single hits highlight how the long decay is smooth and without flutter

[2 The 12 Reverb Characters]

4-second delay with drums, showing the 12 reverb characters: Balanced, Bassy, Bright, Damped, Distant, Fat, Midrange, Muffled, Resonant, Stable, Thin, and Thinner.

[3 Three Reverse Reverbs]

Balanced/medium length, Stable/short length, Balanced/long length.

[4 Three Vocal Reverbs]

0.8s length, 1.6s length, 8.0s length

[5 Three PreDelay Drum Reverbs]

Short length, medium length, long length