Fair enough. Here's the story of how all of this came about....
I was sick as a dog and on OTC medication that kept me from using power tools. The side effects of the chemicals in my system, and my general malaise banished decent night time rest and I was up at odd hours. Lack of sleep does funny things to my already strange mind, and for some reason my thoughts centered on impulse responses and capturing resonant spaces. I have used acoustic body resonances to create interesting effects on recorded bass lines and wondered if anyone had created IR's for just wood. I could not find anything, so I pulled out a few of pieces of scrap wood (maple, shedua, cedar, walnut) and recorded the sound of my striking them with the handle of a screwdriver. I then converted the resulting recordings into IR's and experimented with them. Applying the IR's to a recorded bass line produced results that I very much liked, and I was intrigued. The maple IR affected the tone in the same way that many people say maple affects tone of an acoustic guitar. I then looked up the published properties of the other species on the
Tonewood Datasource, which is a web site dedicated to compiling information of this sort. Interestingly enough my very rough samples were affecting the tone very similarly to what was documented on the site.
Not satisfied that my samples were truly representing the EQ of the wood due to the methodology I was using to collect the samples I ordered a tactile transducer and proceeded to collect samples using a sine sweep, which produces more accurate results. The resulting IR's are much cleaner, and reinforced the results from the first round of tests. To be honest I was giddy. The way the IR's affected the tone was wonderful to my ears, and I immediately thought that it would be a shame to keep this to myself. The results also spurred on new lines of thought. Could this be used outside of the studio? Absolutely - a $200 IR loading pedal could free these for use on stage. Woods that would be impractical or undesirable to use in an instrument build (e.g. balsa, etc.) could be "modeled" and used to color tone if the sounds are pleasing.
Traditional IR's are not able to capture as much of the physical properties of how sound is affected when passing through a material as I would like....what could I do to replicate this experience? A pedal...perhaps a large pedal, depending on how large the wooden modules will need to be to produce significant differences between wood species.... What if the modules were in two varieties? Solid blocks will produce tight sounds, and hollow modules *might* produce more resonant effects. I have ordered all of the parts to build a prototype and have no doubt that it will produce something useful, even if it's not what I expect. I already have a list of the things I know will be problematic, and certainly more will become apparent as I play around. I think that the foot switch will need to be in a separate enclosure to avoid large spikes of noise being picked up by the microphone in the unit. It might be larger than is desired. Would a piezo with a large frequency response included in the module provide interesting results? It would require an additional preamp built in, but that's doable. What about having both a piezo and a condenser mic....perhaps with either a switch, or additional blend pot... There's a lot of potential for an interesting and unique effects "processor".
How does this play into an instrument build? My goodness...the possibilities are endless. I have been pondering an idea for an acoustic instrument that has an internal sound board for a long while now, and the results of this experiment will provide further evidence for it's possible feasibility. It's not like I really need to add one more build to my list, but I love to dream.
