Plate Reverb IR Collection, Part One

Product Description

NOTE- This product is a collection of standard IRs- reverb impulses that will work with any convolution plug-in that allows you to load your own impulses. My other products on this site are for use with Nebula, so if you don’t own Nebula be sure to stick to the Impulse Response Reverb category.

General Info

Four 140 plates were sampled extensively- at multiple positions on their damper controls, with alternate versions of two of the plates, and two or three dynamic steps (different amounts of input drive used during sampling) available for everything. Altogether there are 105 impulses in this collection. 44.1khz, 48khz, 88.2khz, and 96khz collections are available for download to all purchasers. You should use the sample rate that matches your project when possible.

Be sure to check out the audio demos to hear these plate impulses in action!

Plate Models

There are two tube driven 140 plates, and these were sampled from earlier models which output a mono reverb signal. They’re thicker and darker sounding. There are also two solid state driven 140 plates. These are the later models, and put out a stereo signal. Most people probably prefer these to the tube driven ones due to their more balanced (brighter) frequency response.

Damper Control Settings

All four plates were sampled at seven positions across their damper control. This gives you a range of options from no dampening (fully open, longest reverb times, biggest sound), to fully dampened (very fast reverb like a small room).

Organization, Editing

These impulses were all sampled at 32 or 24 bit, and have been meticulously edited for consistency. Expect a higher quality presentation than you would find in random free impulses you can find online. Every impulse filename includes a ‘codename’ I’ve given each individual plate, to help differentiate between them. Theses plates can sound similar, but also very different! To help you remember which is which I gave them names based on mythology. In this set- Olympus, Apollo, Styx, and Minotaur.

Alt Versions

There are two alternate plate sets. The first is ‘Apollo Bionic’, which was made using a technique I came up with, where the sampling tones are ran through the hardware at faster or slower than normal playback speed. The end result is that the frequency response of the plate is shifted up or down, as well as lengthening or shortening the decay. There are 3 of these alt versions of the Apollo plate. They have the same qualities of the standard plate, but with darker or brighter tonal fingerprints. They were all sampled with no dampening.

The other alternate set is the Minotaur pseudo stereo reverbs. Because Minotaur was one of the mono tube plates, I thought it would be interesting to produce a stereo version. I did this by running some of the impulses for this plate through an old Orban ‘Stereo Synthesizer’, which isn’t a synthesizer in the typical sense, but really just a pseudo stereo unit. It produces a stereo output from a mono input simply by applying comb filters to each channel, with the comb being inverted between the two channels. I made 6 different versions using different setting combinations on the Orban unit.

Dynamic Steps

There are up to three options for different levels of sampled input drive available for each sampled plate/setup. The difference in sound between them is usually subtle, but after you find which plate/setup you want to use you should also try all of these out just to see if you prefer one.