LOST PLACES: LOFI IMPULSE RESPONSES

I don't know if your experiences are similar to mine here (I actually heard a bunch of people describing this very same effect) but during lockdown, I started to notice stuff about my surroundings that I hadn't noticed before. So, all of a sudden, I started recognising all these abandoned buildings right where I live.

And there was something about these buildings that really fascinated me; and somehow, I knew right away that I wanted to approach or explore this feeling creatively - but I wasn't really sure how.

However, eventually, I came up with the idea of turning these lost places into impulse responses. So I did some research on how the pros record their impulse responses, packed all the fancy recording equipment I own, entered my first abandoned building and recorded a couple of impulse responses. However, when I checked the recordings in Ableton, I immediately realised that, although the impulse responses I made sounded really nice, they didn't capture the essence, the spirit, the brokenness I experienced inside this particular building. Simply put, my impulse responses sounded too clean; too sterile. After a couple of days (and after watching quite a bunch of Hainbach's videos on YouTube), I came up with the idea of recording the impulse responses as LOFI as possible - I used a Zoom H1n (actually a surprisingly good low-budget field recorder) and a bunch of different tape recorders and dictaphones...and this really did the trick.

So, just pop the IRs into your convolution reverb of choice and explore the sonic characteristics of 24 different lost places.