John from http://www.balancemastering.com/ has released an amazing free collection of Convolution Reverb on their site. They recorded a Funktion One System at a venue in London. John has offered this up to the music producer community to give us some cool new tools and reverbs to play with. John contacted me about the release and we started talking about the project. Here is some of our conversation.

So first of All how is it having access to a Funktion One System for mixing?

Well The Hive Project during the day and evening is an excellent theatre called The Yard (http://theyardtheatre.co.uk), so we only had a few hours to do our thing and get the IRs recorded before people started arriving for the play. Although I’ve been to gigs there before – the now retired promoters Colony (http://colonyparty.com/) put on some great shows there – I had a pretty clear idea of what the system sounds like and what I wanted to capture. Funktion One is a great sounding system, I’m always amazed at how good they sound in big spaces. You would expect the sound to get muddy in a large space such as The Hive Project but there’s a great clarity in the mid, upper mid and high frequencies. Berghain in Berlin is the best example of this. It’s a massive space but once you’re on the dance floor things sound great.

What inspired you to make an IR of the system?

The idea’s been in my head for a while, but mastering takes up so much of my time it was difficult to fit it in. I’m a fan of convolution in general and once you understand what it can and can’t do, you then can get really creative with it. I’ve used convolution on a master in quite non-standard ways and clients have been very happy with the results. We get a fair bit of electronic music to master so I figured it would be a good tool for the producers that we work with. Actually, I think the idea was fully cemented when I was chatting to a friend Kirsti who runs null+void (http://null-void.co.uk). The topic of Funktion One came up and she mentioned some famous producer – I can’t recall who now – that if they could have one piece of equipment it’d be a Funktion One rig in their living room to test tracks out on.

How did you actually get the convolution reverbs?

We used the sine sweep method. It gives a better signal-to-noise ratio than recording a straight impulse. So we ran a pretty long 20–20,000Hz sine sweep through the system, capturing it with a pair of AKG 414’s in X–Y configuration. Spent a lot of time experimenting with the mic position and configuration first. Just recording some reference tracks that I’m very familiar with. After the recordings were made there was a lot of tweaking done to the impulse responses so that they sounded like music playing in the room. This wasn’t something I was expecting to have to do initially, but what I was hearing in the raw impulse responses didn’t exactly tie up with the sound of music coming out of the real speakers in the room. So I made sure that the impulse responses sounded as close as possible to the music in the room by shaping and sculpting them. Then back in the studio I spend more time tweaking so that the IRs worked well as a mix tool.

Do you use these in your mastering? And what is the most unique way you have used these IR?

Well, I haven’t used them in mastering yet, these were more made as a mix tool for producers. A lot of the music we master is destined for clubs so I thought that it would be a great tool for my mastering clients to help them make good mixes. The IRs can definitely be used as a regular reverb, but the main purpose is to be able to check your tracks on a virtual Funktion One system. In the future I might use them during a mastering session to quickly check what things sound like, but for the most part I work off my main monitors which I’m already very familiar with how they sound and translate. Though I’d definitely be interested to know if anybody puts them to use in a creative way!

John Flynn is a mastering engineer at Balance Mastering. Send him on a track and he’ll make you a free mastering sample:(http://www.balancemastering.com/) Download the free collection of Convolution Reverb on their site.