Questions

An impulse response is a short recording of how something resonates. Convolving your signal with it applies that resonance — so a body IR gives a pickup the hollow, ringing character of an instrument body it never had.

It is not a guitar-cab IR and not a reverb. Cab IRs model a speaker, and reverb models a room. This models the box the strings are attached to.

An under-saddle or piezo pickup hears the string and the bridge, and almost nothing of the body around them. The resonances that make an acoustic sound acoustic never reach it. That missing part is exactly what a body IR puts back.

No. Designing and auditioning are free and need no sign-up — open the page and press play. You only sign in if you have bought a pass and want your downloads on another device.

The Tiny Designer is the homepage: pick an instrument, three sliders, play, and download. The full designer adds per-band EQ and ring length, resonance density, mic distance, the wood variations, live instrument input and your own audio files. Both produce the same kind of file, and both are free to use.

Before your reverb and delay, not after.

The body is part of the instrument, and the room comes after the instrument. Putting reverb first means its tail gets the body's resonances stamped onto it, which smears the sound. This is the single most common way to make a body IR sound wrong.

Match it to the longest your hardware accepts. A longer file is not better if the device truncates it.

Yes, with any convolution plugin. Use the full-length file — a DAW has no slot limit, and the longer file is the whole decay rather than a truncated one. Blend it under the dry DI rather than replacing it.

Mono, which is what a body IR should be. Downloads are 48 kHz 32-bit float, with a 44.1 kHz 24-bit option for a smaller file. Some hardware converts on import — Helix Edit downsamples to 16-bit/48 kHz, so bit depth makes no difference there.

It is. 1024 samples is about 21 ms, and these bodies ring for far longer — hundreds of milliseconds. It is a genuine taste of the sound rather than the whole of it, and a longer format lets the body actually ring out. The length switch beside Play lets you hear the difference before you choose.

Nothing about designing. Every control, every instrument and unlimited auditioning are free — you can shape a body and hear it on your own playing without paying anything. You need a pass to download the actual IR file.

No. Nothing renews and nothing bills you monthly. Access is bought once, for a period, and simply ends — you are never charged again without asking.

Yes. A file you have downloaded is yours and keeps working, on any machine, for as long as you keep it. Access governs downloading, not the files themselves.

On the same browser you bought from, nothing is needed — it already knows you. On another device, use Sign in and we email a link that brings you back. If you open that link on a different device it asks for a short code instead.

It can be corrected from the browser you bought with. We email the new address to confirm, nothing moves until you click that link, and your downloads keep working in the meantime.

It plays and downloads on a phone. Designing is easier on a computer — there are a lot of sliders — and live instrument input needs an audio interface, which in practice means a desktop.

Yes, in the full designer. Plug in through an audio interface, switch to the Instrument tab, and monitor on headphones. Expect some latency: the browser is not a low-latency audio host, and it is for judging the sound rather than for tracking.

Yes. The design lives in the page's address, so bookmarking or sharing the link reproduces exactly the same body. The same settings always generate the same file.