shasha
Fractal Fanatic
Not many have been following my thread about re-amping using SPDIF or analog, but those that have know the lengths I've gone through to get this thing to work optimally and it's working extremely well right now. I did have a lot of failures that in a lot of ways led to discoveries and forced me to learn my hardware better. I have a Focusrite Saffire Pro24DSP audio interface and to be honest I knew how to record with a few of the inputs and how to listen to stuff with it and that's about it. Re-amping failure after failure forced me to learn how to use this thing properly and to it's full capabilities. I went from novice to pretty damn close to expert in a few days of beating my head against it. If it can do something I know how to do it because I've tried it at this point. Its a really good feeling to have.
Anyway with my new found knowledge and abilities I was just dorking with AxeEdit dialing in a new patch and recording some stuff (wet via analog and dry via SPDIF) and I wasn't really happy with the cab I was using. I decided that I was going to mix a new one in IR-Lab and make a really good custom mixed one. So I bypassed the cabinet in AxeEdit and got ready to record a wet track to load into IR-Lab...but wait a minute the frickin' reverb and crap is after the cabinet in this patch and it does color the sound a bit (intentionally). This isn't going to work that well at this point.
What I was thinking to myself was that it would be really cool to be able to mix an IR with it actually mimicking the location inside the patch.
Then a little voice said "if you route it, it will work....idiot". So I bypassed everything after the amp (made sure everything was set for pass thru) and recorded that as the wet track and I also recorded the dry guitar. Sent them both as separate mixdowns to the desktop and closed my DAW. I then opened up IR-Lab and loaded the wet version up and fed it into the IR-Mixer side.
Now this is where knowing my hardware comes into play. Because the AxeFXII has the SPDIF feeding it from my audio interface I can send any audio file being played back into it by using the audio interface's monitor mixer. So I took DAW1 (the output of almost any application for playback) and routed that for playout to the SPDIF output. Set the AxeFXII for SPDIF input in the I/O menu, bypassed everything in AxeEdit that was just recorded and enabled everything after the cab that was previously bypassed and played the file in media player. Low and behold the damn thing worked. So I started loading IR's into the IR-Mixer portion of IR-Lab (I like typing the letters IR) and I was able to fine tune the mixed IR as it went through the AxeFXII and I could tweak on both at the same time.
Of course I don't have the amp and cabinet parameters available here at this point so I'm kind of static for those two, but I had a close enough tone dialed in that I could create a really good IR by being able to sort of preview it at the same time. Plus I had a great quality audio file that was an exact copy of what the AxeFXII was going to sound like up to the cabinet's input. As good as IR-Lab is there are some really powerful options in the AxeFXII that pretty much will take what you create and make it sound even better. So really by tweaking to the best of my abilities here I was rewarded by sounding even better when I saved the file and loaded it into the AxeFXII.
Now I know that there are people out there that are looking for tips and shortcuts and crap to dial in their tones all the time. I cannot overstate how important the cabinet and it's parameters are...learn them. Motor Drive is an obvious one that isn't going to be available outside of the AxeFXII and it's a powerful one. But a few that really make a huge difference in making a cab sound like its got some space are the proximity parameter (I think of this as punch of thump because it will add some bass and make it hit harder...use very judiciously), room level and size (two of my favorites) and I always end up adding a little bit of air as well.
I almost forgot about the other really cool part here. You remember that dry track I recorded earlier? Well I was able to play that in media player as well while I dialed in the patch with the amp and cabinet enabled. It's an exact copy of my guitar hitting the input of the patch. You want to talk about speeding this tweaking crap up? I was able to go into the amp settings inside of AxeEdit now and fine tune things like the speaker menu (another hugely important and powerful area).
When I felt like I was where I wanted to be I switched the input of the AxeFXII from SPDIF to analog, turned the volume up, pounded a few chords and proceeded to nearly crap my pants.
Anyway with my new found knowledge and abilities I was just dorking with AxeEdit dialing in a new patch and recording some stuff (wet via analog and dry via SPDIF) and I wasn't really happy with the cab I was using. I decided that I was going to mix a new one in IR-Lab and make a really good custom mixed one. So I bypassed the cabinet in AxeEdit and got ready to record a wet track to load into IR-Lab...but wait a minute the frickin' reverb and crap is after the cabinet in this patch and it does color the sound a bit (intentionally). This isn't going to work that well at this point.
What I was thinking to myself was that it would be really cool to be able to mix an IR with it actually mimicking the location inside the patch.
Then a little voice said "if you route it, it will work....idiot". So I bypassed everything after the amp (made sure everything was set for pass thru) and recorded that as the wet track and I also recorded the dry guitar. Sent them both as separate mixdowns to the desktop and closed my DAW. I then opened up IR-Lab and loaded the wet version up and fed it into the IR-Mixer side.
Now this is where knowing my hardware comes into play. Because the AxeFXII has the SPDIF feeding it from my audio interface I can send any audio file being played back into it by using the audio interface's monitor mixer. So I took DAW1 (the output of almost any application for playback) and routed that for playout to the SPDIF output. Set the AxeFXII for SPDIF input in the I/O menu, bypassed everything in AxeEdit that was just recorded and enabled everything after the cab that was previously bypassed and played the file in media player. Low and behold the damn thing worked. So I started loading IR's into the IR-Mixer portion of IR-Lab (I like typing the letters IR) and I was able to fine tune the mixed IR as it went through the AxeFXII and I could tweak on both at the same time.
Of course I don't have the amp and cabinet parameters available here at this point so I'm kind of static for those two, but I had a close enough tone dialed in that I could create a really good IR by being able to sort of preview it at the same time. Plus I had a great quality audio file that was an exact copy of what the AxeFXII was going to sound like up to the cabinet's input. As good as IR-Lab is there are some really powerful options in the AxeFXII that pretty much will take what you create and make it sound even better. So really by tweaking to the best of my abilities here I was rewarded by sounding even better when I saved the file and loaded it into the AxeFXII.
Now I know that there are people out there that are looking for tips and shortcuts and crap to dial in their tones all the time. I cannot overstate how important the cabinet and it's parameters are...learn them. Motor Drive is an obvious one that isn't going to be available outside of the AxeFXII and it's a powerful one. But a few that really make a huge difference in making a cab sound like its got some space are the proximity parameter (I think of this as punch of thump because it will add some bass and make it hit harder...use very judiciously), room level and size (two of my favorites) and I always end up adding a little bit of air as well.
I almost forgot about the other really cool part here. You remember that dry track I recorded earlier? Well I was able to play that in media player as well while I dialed in the patch with the amp and cabinet enabled. It's an exact copy of my guitar hitting the input of the patch. You want to talk about speeding this tweaking crap up? I was able to go into the amp settings inside of AxeEdit now and fine tune things like the speaker menu (another hugely important and powerful area).
When I felt like I was where I wanted to be I switched the input of the AxeFXII from SPDIF to analog, turned the volume up, pounded a few chords and proceeded to nearly crap my pants.
If I read you correct, that is freakin awesome!!! 