For Those Who Struggle with Traditional IRs

[Piing]

That's a great question. I can only guess that unusual resonances are the answer, since other peoples' presets (I wish I was down with OPP) sound awful with my guitar, and traditional IRs often sound so harsh until I add a lot of smoothing. No, I wouldn't know where to start with an FFT or something like that. I'm guessing that if I just applying a liberal amount of EQ immediately after the input block, just going by my ears, I could take someone else's presets and make my guitar sound good with them. But I conjecture that the big reason is the reversal of the way you'd create a mic'd amp in a studio. Normally one would have a great tone, move a mic around a bunch until you found the sweet spot, and record. With this, you're using the sweet spot someone has set up with a particular guitar or set of guitars, through a particular amp(s), and I think it just can't apply well to your tone unless you happen to have a guitar and amp that sound similar to that of the IR or preset creator.

Not knocking IR creators at all, or preset creators. I'm just saying it takes a ton of smoothing for them not to sound bad with my guitar, so I then look to my guitar itself to be the cause, since so many people get great results. And I've tried every other kind of tweak: extreme amp settings, EQ at every possible point in the chain, but nothing works for me as magically as simply adding smoothing.

But I've also largely been away from my guitar for a few months now while we're moving into a house, so I totally mean to try @jamesmarshall's suggestions when possible to see if they just sound better. And for that, I would just use a parametric EQ right after the input block and just sweep with different Qs and see what happens.

#MeToo. While most factory presets are quite balanced, I rarely find a third-party preset/IR that is not harsh to my ears.

Could it be that other's ears have lost sensitivity to high-frequencies?

 

[Dave Merrill]

#MeToo. While most factory presets are quite balanced, I rarely find a third-party preset/IR that is not harsh to my ears.

Could it be that other's ears have lost sensitivity to high-frequencies?

Me three.

But in my case, I suspect the problem is that I'm playing by myself in my basement "studio", and gravitating towards too much warmth and not enough cut, because nothing in my household has anywhere near the treble of a cranked Marshall.

My conclusion for now is that I don't care, I should make myself happy and comfortable. At some point I'll put some more effort into finding well recorded backing tracks to suss out tonal balance in a more absolute sense.

YMMV etc.

 

[State of Epicicity]

OP, what pickups are in your guitar?

I installed a Fishman Classic humbucker set in my Carvin guitar and the guitar now has seemingly more treble than I have ever heard from a guitar. More than my cousins Tele.

It is a lot harder to dial in tones than it should be. Much harder than my other Kiesel to find an IR that doesn’t sound painfully bright and bad.

The Kiesel with any SM57 IR I have by itself, is less bright than using the Carvin with any Royer 121 impulses by themselves.

Have you changed pickups in this guitar ?

In this guitar I've had four different sets of pickups so far:

This is a Schecter Sun Valley Super Shredder Black Limba, and it came with a set of Schecter pickups, the Pasadena and Sunset Strip. I remember thinking they were okay with a lot of gain, but I didn't find them very satisfying or dynamic.

Next I put in my Duncan Saturday Night Specials. I had them in my hardtail superstrat, a Washburn Trevor Rabin, and those things were unbelievable in that guitar, just the very best tone I could hope for. My problem is I have no class, so I have to have Floyd. So I took the Saturday Night Specials out of the Trevor Rabin and put them in the Sun Valley Super Shredder. They were not at all the same in this guitar; they just sounded anemic, and there was this harshness in the bridge I couldn't get rid of. Many demos of the Saturday Night Specials are done with Les Pauls, and coupled with my own experience, I think these pickups just play very very very well with any kind of hardtail guitar, but a Floyd needs a high output pickup to sound warm. With the next set of pickups I found my answer.

By accident I ended up getting two pairs of Asymmetrical Humbuckers, Type A and Type B, from Awesome Guitars. I wrote the owner of the company extensively with my experience with his solderless switching kits; I mean, I wrote a lot, and he was kind enough to send me his Type A set, then later, the Type B set, for comparison and review. The Type A is hotter. The unique thing about these pickups is that they're designed to maximize the difference in tone when splitting to either coil, going parallel, or series in the humbucker. And it's true, if you do dial in your tone to be dynamic, where you can really hear the nuances of your tone (my grail for this is a Plexi, or a Plexi with some kind of drive in front of it), you'll get so many different tones, it's awesome, as the company's name implies haha. But anyway, the moment I put in the Asymmetrical Type A set my guitar went from sounding kind of weak and harsh to sounding like the best Les Paul ever, and nothing about this guitar is like a Les Paul otherwise, except my wiring, where I've installed bastardized Les Paul wiring (50s for the neck and modern for the bridge) with hardwired switching to access splits to each coil, parallel, and series for each pickup using mini-switches. I did a bunch of routing under the pickguard for that, which of course changed the resonance of the guitar I'm sure. The splits and the quacks in the Type A set are all wonderful, and I can even dial in incredible parallel tones too. With the Type Bs I just found them not to have enough output to fight the Floyd. I think the deal is, at least in my experience, that the nature of Floyds just take away meat from the tone, and if you put in really nuanced pickups with low output, you're just getting a shell of a tone, but if you pair your Floyd with some badass flame throwers, you can actually get real soul out the guitar. This could all be bullshit, but it's how I see it. It could also be that this guitar has a pickguard, so the lack of direct mounting is making everything lower output more shrill or anemic. I'm sure the Awesome Type Bs would be fantastic in any hardtail.

Anyway, to the point of your question, in all these instances I went back to traditional IRs to test what worked, but no matter what I did not like the results; nothing inspired me or felt sweet or soulful, regardless of the results the preset or IR creators got in demos. But in every case, smoothing made it all better. It just made me think it's the guitar itself.

Also, although the Washburn Trevor Rabin with Saturday Night Specials is the ultimate tone machine in my mind, I still used my own captures of movable mic plugins with heavy smoothing to get what I wanted. That makes it still just a sample size of two, so not very helpful haha. I still think if Leon Todd or Brett Kingman created any one of their endless incredible presets, then handed me that very guitar, with that pickup, I wouldn't need to dial in or change a thing; it would just be great. I can alter my technique enough to cover discrepancies of tone in the fingers.

I think if I had the kind of guitar that sets the standard for tone, a Les Paul that sings, a Strat that spanks, a Tele that does whatever the hell those things do, that I'd be right at home with the traditional IRs and readily available presets as they are. But the fact is, I have just used heavily modded superstrats that I'm not using only for high gain stuff. I'm all over place tonally, and I'm always dry. I just like the raw sound of an amp and cab, and maybe a drive if I need it, but that's it, so the frequencies won't be helped at all by compression or reverb or even a colorful delay. It's just dry, unlubricated. So I'm way more susceptible to harshness.

One last point: even with my Awesome Asymmetrical Type As, the best tones I get are when I dial in the gain I want with the tone and volume knobs at 10, but then I roll back the volume to about 9 and the tone back to about 5. I use very low value tone caps that allow me to roll back for a usable tone even at zero. Anyway, no matter what, I find the tone sweeter when I mute it off the the bat that way; it just speaks more. I've actually been thinking of installing some trimpots to make the sweetness permanent, to make my guitar even more of a Les Paul in my mind, tonally.

 

[State of Epicicity]

#MeToo. While most factory presets are quite balanced, I rarely find a third-party preset/IR that is not harsh to my ears.

Could it be that other's ears have lost sensitivity to high-frequencies?

I really think it might just be that reversal of the process, of making the mic static as the immovable part of the chain. That's so weird to me, although I understand why technology developed in that way, but I think if every mic at least had the ability to move it, like the real world, this would mitigate the problem a great deal. I mean, if you hired a studio with staff to record you, how pissed would you be if you plugged in your amp to their cab, but they wouldn't move the damn mic? The whole point of audio engineering is to use your ears and do whatever they tell you to do, and of course any engineer who's good would not be dogmatic about placing the mic only one place, because you and your amp will change how sound in the room moves around. I feel like it's just reversing the process in a way that can stand in the way of tone if your guitar doesn't happen to line up the right way.

And of course a moveable mic on its own won't automatically be the answer either; you'll still have to scroll to find the best thing for you at that moment, but at least it's more in line with the real world, and orders of magnitude more flexible.

The smoothing thing is another matter, and I think it has to do with room reflections. I think they just color things too much, and that many IRs are not shot in rooms that are treated to dampen the sound of the room very much, if at all. And it probably does sound great with the particular gear of the creators, but makes the result colorful enough to limit how well they translate for guitarists like me.

This is total conjecture here, so take it with a grain of salt.

 

[State of Epicicity]

Me three.

But in my case, I suspect the problem is that I'm playing by myself in my basement "studio", and gravitating towards too much warmth and not enough cut, because nothing in my household has anywhere near the treble of a cranked Marshall.

My conclusion for now is that I don't care, I should make myself happy and comfortable. At some point I'll put some more effort into finding well recorded backing tracks to suss out tonal balance in a more absolute sense.

YMMV etc.

You have another, and a great point, always to keep in mind your application, if you're going for mix ready or you just want to practice by yourself. I'm always going for something I think of as 70s drums warm and dry. Or something like Bing Crosby's voice, where it's present and warm, but you could just listen forever, because there are no offending frequencies to distract you. I sometimes marvel at the level of audiophile bliss created with just a mic in front of that guy in the 50s, yet seventy years later music often is mixed to sound congested and inhuman.

 

[sprint]

been pumping some Air parameter into my cab block lately at around 6k hz to try and get some of that "brashness" I hear in many old classic rock tunes (think Steely Dan, "Reelin in the Years" - a harshness, but not really).

 

[State of Epicicity]

been pumping some Air parameter into my cab block lately at around 6k hz to try and get some of that "brashness" I hear in many old classic rock tunes (think Steely Dan, "Reelin in the Years" - a harshness, but not really).

I've never like the tone in that particular song, as much as I worship the engineering in Steely Dan songs. But that's a great idea to try; I know that parameter's there, but I always forget and completely skip over it.

 

[jamesmarshall]

I've never like the tone in that particular song, as much as I worship the engineering in Steely Dan songs. But that's a great idea to try; I know that parameter's there, but I always forget and completely skip over it.

Also, the mic preamp section in general is quite powerful. The Eq, the hi and low cut, plus the drive and saturation not to mention the Air and "verb". I don't like the verb personally, because I like to add verb in the box, but it is still powerful.

 

[Piing]

Also, the mic preamp section in general is quite powerful. The Eq, the hi and low cut, plus the drive and saturation not to mention the Air and "verb". I don't like the verb personally, because I like to add verb in the box, but it is still powerful.

Yes, these are also my friends. The EQ at the Mic Preamp section is somewhat different than adding a EQ block. Different preamp types (in high-quality mode) together with the Drive and Saturation controls also redifine the flavour of the high frequencies

 

[State of Epicicity]

Also, the mic preamp section in general is quite powerful. The Eq, the hi and low cut, plus the drive and saturation not to mention the Air and "verb". I don't like the verb personally, because I like to add verb in the box, but it is still powerful.

Yes, these are also my friends. The EQ at the Mic Preamp section is somewhat different than adding a EQ block. Different preamp types (in high-quality mode) together with the Drive and Saturation controls also redifine the flavour of the high frequencies

Totally. I love experimenting with the saturation and drive of the different models in that section. It's such a cool way to add even more vibe. For that matter, I'd be really really curious to know exactly how many instances of various hi and lo cuts we have in the Axe-FX III. It's mind blowing the number of ways you can shape your tone.

 

[RackAddict]

“dynIR” is a marketing term. It is just a cute way of describing the modern interface of cabinet plugins letting you move a virtual mic around the virtual speaker.

Two notes is doing nothing unique or special. Their IR’s do not magically sound better than everyone else’s.

Have you personally tried their wall of sound plug-in?

Anytime I go through regular IRs but then switch to A/B compare the two notes stuff I feel like playing through a real cab sitting in a recording room. Applying EQ is has a much more natural effect to it when I do it. At least to my ears.

 

[cole lewis]

Have you personally tried their wall of sound plug-in?

Read.. They tell you what I said themselves. DynIR means the ability to move the virtual mic around the virtual speaker. There are a whole bunch of companies doing this. What gives the industry the ability to take these IR’s is Dynamount mic robots. These allow you to take IR’s of every position on the speaker in a mathematical / perfect fashion. THAT is what was/is special about two notes.

To make this very clear. I have nothing against two notes. They have exceptional products. Great speaker options these days especially with their cabs.

All IR’s are shot at least somewhat differently. Different mic preamps, different mics, different choices made on low cuts or high cuts on the IR’s. Whatever they do in that regard, makes you like their IR’s. I just want it to be extremely clear it is not some magic thing they sprinkle into their IR’s. They make them the same way as everyone else. Just with their own “flavor”.

 

[Piing]

That DynIR must be some kind of equalizer/FX applied to a single IR to kind of emulate moving the mike to different positions, but not the actual captures at these positions. There is no way they would be using 160,000 static IRs with the real captures at all these spots. And the same applies to the different microphones. They are no real captures; they capture the original with a flat mic and then apply IRs of different mikes.

Anyway, maybe I will get the Torpedo for my SY-1000. I will be playing with a band for a couple of casual gigs and I do not want to carry the Axe-FX III + pedalboard, so I will use the Boss with the IR loader. Then I will be able to compare.

 

[cole lewis]

That DynIR must be some kind of equalizer/FX applied to a single IR to kind of emulate moving the mike to different positions, but not the actual captures at these positions. There is no way they would be using 160,000 static IRs with the real captures at all these spots. And the same applies to the different microphones. They are no real captures; they capture the original with a flat mic and then apply IRs of different mikes.

Anyway, maybe I will get the Torpedo for my SY-1000. I will be playing with a band for a couple of casual gigs and I do not want to carry the Axe-FX III + pedalboard, so I will use the Boss with the IR loader. Then I will be able to compare.

I would think too that your theory on how they do it is correct, but I dunno how the end result would sound better to someone with that approach than using real mics, real captures. I guess anything is possible. Sure doesn’t make me want to use WOS if that were the case. You’re probably right though.

 

[State of Epicicity]

That DynIR must be some kind of equalizer/FX applied to a single IR to kind of emulate moving the mike to different positions, but not the actual captures at these positions. There is no way they would be using 160,000 static IRs with the real captures at all these spots. And the same applies to the different microphones. They are no real captures; they capture the original with a flat mic and then apply IRs of different mikes.

The way IK does it with Amplitube makes it more plain: in version 3 they used to have a 10 x 10 grid on which you could place a mic in a particular spot, and that was it; I believe each was a genuine IR. Then they removed the grid for version 4, making the mic freely movable, but I think they still had that original grid as the basis for the can section, just interpolating between 100 IRs. Now for version 5 they've reshot all their IRs, with a lot more of them in more positions in space, and you can switch between the new grid or free movement with interpolation.

I can't say for sure how Two Notes does it, bit I imagine it's similar. I'm sure that Two Notes and Overloud are starting from a good selection of regular shot IRs; sure it's not 160,000, but maybe just 100 with interpolation is enough.

As for the Mikko plugin, Mikko has said it's an unbelievable number of IRs for each mic, plus fancy math, as he put it, so I'm sure it's interpolation.

But I really don't think for any of them that they're working off just a single capture per mic.

Now with Overloud's TH-U it gets really interesting, because the go three steps further, and for each mic position you have the original IR interpolated, they're Respire version, adding more low end to create the feeling of being in a room with cab, a "remastered" version of the mic with greater presence, and the remastered sound with Respire. So for any position you can flip switches for four different variations. Whatever kind of processing they use for this, they do sound good to my ears.

 

[RackAddict]

I'm not referring to the option to move the mic around. It just sounds unbelievable. It has this depth to it.

 

[cole lewis]

I'm not referring to the option to move the mic around. It just sounds unbelievable. It has this depth to it.

How do run it? There is a whole bunch of processing options inside. EQ, compression, etc. To be clear you think their IR’s to you sound better with zero processing within two notes software running?

 

[State of Epicicity]

How do run it? There is a whole bunch of processing options inside. EQ, compression, etc. To be clear you think their IR’s to you sound better with zero processing within two notes software running?

I know you were asking RackAddict, but I can say that when I run it, I bypass their EQ, compression, the exciter, and everything else (I can't recall everything available), and I just run a DynIR dry in mono, or maybe I'll mix two in mono. For me the mic type really matters, and I find that their Knightfall condenser, e.g., sounds great with my guitar. It sounds more open, to use the most amorphous phrase possible haha.

 

[RifferMcDuck]

Most of this convo is over my head, but I just wanted to add that I've only been truly happy with my tones when using something where I can move the microphone(s) around a simulated speaker. It was interesting, because it all started while I was out of town a while back and was using STL Amphub, and I found myself feeling more comfortable with my tones than I did with the Axe. Like I was enjoying playing more and didn't have that feeling of "something's off, gotta fix it" that I usually get when dealing with IRs. When I got back to my Axe, the first thing I did was try out the MIKKO plugin, and just immediately realized how much that makes a difference to me. I now feel like I'm truly tuning each IR to whatever guitar and amp I'm using at the time and no longer feel stressed about scrolling endlessly to find the right one. Easiest purchase ever.

 

[cole lewis]

As great as it is in concept. More than half of Helix users with the new cabinet sim. Will be using user IR’s. More than half of Quad Cortex users.. Using their own IR’s. Every time I’ve loaded a Neural DSP plug-in. Didn’t take long for me to load in some ownhammer IR’s.

I’ve been using IR’s for like half a decade now. You learn which ones you like after playing for a while. It’s almost impossible to get bad sound with certain 4x12 Mesa IR’s, on virtually any amp model.

The amount of stuff going into this is deeper than just. Virtual mic makes you get better sound.

How about. The companies approach to making IR’s PERIOD? Things like. Choosing the best sounding cabinet you have with great well broken in speakers, mics, mic placement, etc.

It feels like you guys are focusing on this one aspect to a much larger puzzle. If you can’t get a good sound with an Ownhammer Mesa 4x12 IR pack... Then you must be doing something super weird in how you play guitar or dial in tones.