IRs are 90% of the sound

if you play chugga-chugga higain tones, this might be true - for me they often sound pretty much identical :tonguewink:. From a musicians and technician view point, it is a combination of the player, his guitar, the amp (and settings) the speaker and the ears aka the player......with IRs you have to try out some until you find one you like - and if you found one, try to find more that are similar....you can't like them all and there is no right and wrong, it is your taste. If an IR makes 90% of your sound, fine - for my perspective my playing makes the majority of my sound ;)
 
Well, there are “fast” speakers and “slow” speakers, so I guess that holds truth for (some) IR’s as well. Not to mention the size, shape and material of the box. And how about mic placement. Distance = time.
And the difference between our hands (what we are trying to achieve, our intentions and expectations) and ears (what eventually returns to out brains, our results) is what many of us call ”feel”. The smaller the difference, the better the feel.
Just my two cents though, opinions are like……oh well…..
 
I would now have to agree with the OP that IRs are 90 percent of the sound. Especially now that I've managed to be able to upgrade my monitors from whey overrated Yamahas to some really high quality Adams and they allow me to really be able to notice the quality, clarity, and realism of Impulse responses (or lack of) a lot more prominently. The ribbon tweeters seem to provide an incredible level of detail from 1k and up.

Which leads me to say that 90 percent of an IR are the A to D converters used in the capture. And remember, converters have a cumulative effect so if anything you are playin through 2 of them really wth the afx3, if you incrudprothe converter characteristics that are printed on the IR. Add a DAW and now you are hearing the cumulative effect of converters on your sound plus the ones embedded in the IR. The lower the grade the more smeared nonsense on the IR.

And far after putting a bunch of companies I previously bought through their paces with these new monitors, its has all made me only reach only for very few IRs.

Let's just say that now I have absolutely no use for 90 percent of my IRs which are dull and wooly sounding in comparison to ones I have chosen not to list. But the matter is now laughable in some cases.

Obviously this confirms my prior assumptions I have made that A to D conversion at the capture stage is key to maximize realism and prevent generational build up of converter content. Converter is prolly more key than even poweramp/preamp quality used.

And just try Adam monitors and you may just be asking the same questions in your studio. It just forces you into this frame of reference. And once you go ribbons, you are not coming back. And you really do hear the problems and smear with many IRs.

I am therefore once again desperately looking for good quality IRs. Like the OP, I've bought basically everything out there and struggle to find something decent.

But a vast majority of the ones I have tried on the entire market sound dull, wooly and smeared by nonsense.
 
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No, an IR shouldn't do that. At least, I don't think so. Feel under the fingers seems to be about compression to me, and IRs are linear.

Some of the speaker and impedance settings in the Amp block will affect compression. Some of the settings in the Cab block (relating to the emulated mic pre) will as well. If you're playing loud enough, the IR will affect what comes out of the speaker, which will affect the acoustic feedback loop between the speaker and the guitar...which will affect compression. But, the IR doesn't do it directly.

That being said....I'm still somewhat unclear what people actually mean when they say that things like that change the feel under the fingers. There is an interaction there between a real speaker and a guitar that could be related, specifically compression....and that seems to be what people are talking about...but....I can't honestly say I've ever felt it. I play a little differently based on the compression I hear, but I'd describe it as how long the note sustains and exactly how the note decays. Not feel.

But...a lot of the way people talk about sound doesn't make any sense to me.

I did a master not too long ago and got complimented specifically on the sense of depth that they thought was better in the master than in the mix. I get it in a mix context (depth is mostly about delay and reverb, maybe a bit about distortion to some people, probably because distortion implies compression/limiting, and consequently compression/limiting after the reverb/delay)....but short of compressing and limiting making the quiet reverb/delay tails louder and me adding (a tiny bit) more distortion (so, even more compression/limiting), I don't have a clue how one would even try to affect "depth" in mastering without going whole ham and adding a bunch of junk instead of suggesting a re-mix.

But, apparently, I'm doing it "right" and perhaps just describing it differently. So...whatever.

I'm all but convinced that the vast majority of people just plain don't grok compression, and I'm absolutely certain that there are people who understand it a LOT better than I do.

I don't know why, but there is something fundamentally wrong with IR's. If I knew the answer I could make a couple of bucks, I'm almost sure this is what is underlying the complaints of some people with Modelling.

My background. In the last three years I have fought and fought and fought with ALL the digital software and IR's out there, the first thing I discovered early on, was that to get rid of that horrible harshness, putting one cab sim before another cab sim ( in series ) solved a lot of issues. When I purchased my first Real modeller, Axe 3, mk II, Turbo ... what did I find? they have done the same thing, there is a speaker( in the amp ) put before another speaker ( in the cab section ).. This STILL doesn't solve problems though. Why does my Marshall MG15CF, a practice amp with an 8 inch speaker sound "better" than all the IR stuff? I'll do my best to explain. It presents all the notes evenly, with the same punch or percussiveness if you will, with the digital IR system I find that some strings sound better than others ??? and no, putting compression after the cab doesn't completely solve the problem, it works to a degree, but there's a cost, compression costs tone. My little practice amp punches all the notes out at the same velocity, no weird phasing, and no weird frequencies, and I've mic'ed it using a dynamic and a sm 57 and it sounds great. I'm not fooling myself with the 3d-ness of my room by the way.

Which brings me to the following. Mic placement on a speaker is SO critical, can't Fractal construct a placement feature? Where you can move the mic around on some external software to get to the sweet spot? I think Guitar Rig has this. If not, what about another feature I've seen on another product where there are about 12 dots on a speaker of an amp to choose from, where a mic was placed so that one could really get the tone exact. Currently there's about 4 to 6 mic placements to choose from with the stock IR's ... sorry, it just doesn't cut it. I don't care about 512 or 1024 cabinets. I don't want to go through all of those to get a basic tone. Like, take a classic Marshall, and place a 57, a coles, a 412 and a 121 in 12 different spots and I'm almost sure I could spend half the time I do now trying to find the right tone.

I like a clean, high-gain tone, like Van Halens on 1984. It's almost pure tone, with no fizz, etc.

I bought the highest quality modeller, the Axe 3, mk II, turbo, because I believe this problem can be solved.
 
When I purchased my first Real modeller, Axe 3, mk II, Turbo ... what did I find? they have done the same thing, there is a speaker( in the amp ) put before another speaker ( in the cab section )..
This is not correct... There is no speaker in the Amp block. The IRs are in the Cab block only.

There is a speaker page in the amp block which has settings that affect the interaction between an amp and a speaker cabinet.

There is no "speaker before another speaker"...
 
The older Celestion and other speaker manufacturers used Pulsonic cones which not only have a signature compression they have a signature expression. It as if the speaker adds some sort of slight vocal formant to the note.
The "Greenback aaah".... Yup. The good ones do that....
 
I like a clean, high-gain tone, like Van Halens on 1984. It's almost pure tone, with no fizz, etc.
You can't directly compare live tones to recorded ones. A lot more goes into recorded guitar sounds than live ones.

Also, 1984 is a bit of a weird one. It was recorded in EVH's home studio over the course of 2 years, a lot of which was EVH experimenting with synthesizers. I'd bet quite a lot that most of that guitar sound comes from very precise use of at least their console if not also outboard compression, reverb, and delay.

Oddly enough, a modeler is probably the closest you're ever going to get to that kind of a sound live...but it isn't the simplest thing to do, it doesn't have much to do with the IR, and it'll require a different preset for every song...probably changes or automation for different parts of songs.
 
This is not correct... There is no speaker in the Amp block. The IRs are in the Cab block only.

There is a speaker page in the amp block which has settings that affect the interaction between an amp and a speaker cabinet.

There is no "speaker before another speaker"...

"There is a SPEAKER page in the amp block section?"

Which has a, SPEAKER. lol. You can even choose which speaker you want, like a greenback SPEAKER, or an EV SPEAKER...and then the Cab Block follows...which means it's a speaker, following a speaker. lol.
 
"There is a SPEAKER page in the amp block section?"

Which has a, SPEAKER. lol. You can even choose which speaker you want, like a greenback SPEAKER, or an EV SPEAKER...and then the Cab Block follows...which means it's a speaker, following a speaker. lol.
The Speaker page in the amp block is for the interation of the reactive load of a speaker with the virtual power amp. Tube amps have low damping factors, which means the amplifier reacts to the variations of a complex load.....the curve in the speaker page is your impdeance curve and does not the same as the frequency responce reproduction done by the IR block.....

just tech talk, no lol ;)
 
The Speaker page in the amp block is for the interation of the reactive load of a speaker with the virtual power amp. Tube amps have low damping factors, which means the amplifier reacts to the variations of a complex load.....the curve in the speaker page is your impdeance curve and does not the same as the frequency responce reproduction done by the IR block.....

just tech talk, no lol ;)

Ah, okay.

Is it possible to turn the speaker section in the amp completely off? My guess is that it will sound awful, just going through the cab section. Here, I'll put my money where my mouth is. The only way I could get this non-fizzy tone was by putting a speaker before a speaker, or an IR before an IR. I can't describe technically why this worked, it just did. This is from free online software...

 
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Ah, okay.

Is it possible to turn the speaker section in the amp completely off? My guess is that it will sound awful, just going through the cab section. Here, I'll put my money where my mouth is. The only way I could get this non-fizzy tone was by putting a speaker before a speaker, or an IR before an IR. I can't describe technically why this worked, it just did. This is from free online software...


Have you tried using the high and low cut settings in the Cab block? All you are doing with a "speaker before a speaker" is EQing...

Have you ever listened to isolated recorded guitar tracks? They sound very different from what they sound like in the mix, and often sound quite bad on their own.
 
"There is a SPEAKER page in the amp block section?"

Which has a, SPEAKER. lol. You can even choose which speaker you want, like a greenback SPEAKER, or an EV SPEAKER...and then the Cab Block follows...which means it's a speaker, following a speaker. lol.
You don't choose a speaker... You choose a Speaker Impedance Curve.

As I mentioned before, this affects the way the amp interacts with a speaker/cabinet. It is not an IR...
 
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