Creative Use of Reaper's Convolution Reverb

Published on: 2025-04-25

My favorite DAW Reaper is full of surprises and amazing possibilities just waiting to be discovered. A trick I discovered recently for some creative manipulation of sound is the use of its built-in convolution reverb. The traditional use of a convolution reverb is to emulate the sound a wide range of space. So if you want to make it sound like you recorded a guitar in Carnegie Hall or the inside of a soda bottle, convolution has you covered. Likewise if you want to replicate the sound of a high-end, very expensive reverb. There's a whole bunch of pre-recorded impulse responses for free online that will do this for you. Just load in the impulse into your convolution reverb plugin of choice and you are good to go!

The cool thing about convolution, though, is that it uses DSP magic to morph one sound through another. So there is absolutely no reason why you should stick with emulating spaces in your reverb. Since the impulse response is just another sound file, there is no limit to what you can stick into it: a cello recording, the sound of your child chewing their morning müsli, scraping your fingernails across the blackboard, whatever. If the sound is interesting for you, then go ahead and do it.

The thing to look out for is the length of the file. I find that if the impulse response gets too long it can cause an unpleasant build-up of resonances, depending on the sound itself. Of course, this could easily be used as an interesting new form of oscillator…