Red Wirez Cab Impulses

I just want to take a minute to thank Mike (Red Wirez), Cliff & Tom, and the guys like Jay, Sean, Scott, and all the others who make this community feel like a family. Newbies like me really benefit from your knowledge and willingness to share it. I have learned so much over the last year. My only regret is that I didnt start many many years ago.

Again, you guys are the best!!!!!!!!!!!!

Craig


note: BTW.... my girlfiend hates all of you! :D
 
I like the Axe-FX IRs and have found many useful and toneful ways to run them.

I recently purchased the RW BIGBox set and one of the Speakerbox sets and these sound great, too! I especially like that I can mix the RW IRs using the IR-mix utility and AlbertA's converter is easy as pie. Being able to sculpt IRs this way has bumped the Axe-Fx up yet another level for me.

Maybe CC will release his IRs as wavs so we can take them to the tone party, too. The mixing feature with the RW IRs is really cool.

I am REALLY liking this...now to get better at abusing the linearity of the amps...

Well Done, all you all!

BF3
 
Re: Red Wirez "Tone Recipe Formula" Sharing Thread

There are a couple of things that users should be aware of concerning the Red Wire cab IRs.

I purchased the BigBox bundle and tried some of the Red Wire IRs last night, hosting them in my DAW and my AXE. Some of the IRs sounded great through the DAW, but on the AXE it was a different story. I quickly realized what I had speculated in a post written yesterday that the cabinet IRs might be longer than the 20ms allowed by the AXE.

If you think that everything beyond 20ms is irrelevant to reproducing the sound of a cab then I'd suggest you (or anyone else) do the same thing as I did last night. Host the Red Wirez IRs, especially with some ambient mics used, in your DAW, then host them in the AXE. Unfortunately the 20ms truncation in the AXE causes a significant loss of realism. I heard it for myself last night. Some of the IRs are over ten times as long as the ones the AXE can handle. At least one is over 200ms, and many more are well over 30ms.

The work around is to use a reverb module to create the early room reflections (unless of course you want a totally dry sound) using a small room type and adjusting to taste. I use a decay time of about .5 sec, but it's all a matter of taste.

The Red Wire website talks about how they use tuned rooms, and traps, and this and that, and ambient mics, and make it pretty clear that the room is part of the sound, or at least can be if you want it to. What they don't tell you is that you can't get anything more than the EQ curve with the AXE-FX versions. The ambient mics are completely useless. The files for the AXE are almost all truncated versions of the wav files that Red Wire sells.

I knew this might be the case, so I'm not that disappointed, but some people may think the claims on the Red Wire site apply to the AXE-FX when some of them do not. Just be aware.

I love my AXE, it was the best purchase I ever made, but last night after several hours of experience hosting the Red Wire CABINET IRs in both my DAW and the AXE it became CLEARLY evident the box doesn't do it all. So what? I can accept that. It's not perfect. Damn, but so close. SO CLOSE!

BTW, there are some good IRs in the bundle, although I'm not certain any will make my top 10. It will take days to try them all out.

Stephen Cole
 
sampleaccurate said:
Some of the IRs sounded great through the DAW, but on the AXE it was a different story. I quickly realized what I had speculated in a post written yesterday that the cabinet IRs might be longer than the 20ms allowed by the AXE.

Stephen Cole


How about some clips to demonstrate the difference.

I am curious about your findings.
 
Re: Red Wirez "Tone Recipe Formula" Sharing Thread

It was not our intention to mislead anyone. We wrote 99.9% of the website copy before we even knew the Axe-Fx existed. I just added a disclaimer regarding the truncated IR length and subsequent lack of room reflections in the few spots where we mention the Axe-Fx to clear up any confusion. There's not much I can do beyond that.
 
Re: Red Wirez "Tone Recipe Formula" Sharing Thread

sampleaccurate said:
There are a couple of things that users should be aware of concerning the Red Wire cab IRs.

I purchased the BigBox bundle and tried some of the Red Wire IRs last night, hosting them in my DAW and my AXE. Some of the IRs sounded great through the DAW, but on the AXE it was a different story. I quickly realized what I had speculated in a post written yesterday that the cabinet IRs might be longer than the 20ms allowed by the AXE.

If you think that everything beyond 20ms is irrelevant to reproducing the sound of a cab then I'd suggest you (or anyone else) do the same thing as I did last night. Host the Red Wirez IRs, especially with some ambient mics used, in your DAW, then host them in the AXE. Unfortunately the 20ms truncation in the AXE causes a significant loss of realism. I heard it for myself last night. Some of the IRs are over ten times as long as the ones the AXE can handle. At least one is over 200ms, and many more are well over 30ms.

The work around is to use a reverb module to create the early room reflections (unless of course you want a totally dry sound) using a small room type and adjusting to taste. I use a decay time of about .5 sec, but it's all a matter of taste.

The Red Wire website talks about how they use tuned rooms, and traps, and this and that, and ambient mics, and make it pretty clear that the room is part of the sound, or at least can be if you want it to. What they don't tell you is that you can't get anything more than the EQ curve with the AXE-FX versions. The ambient mics are completely useless. The files for the AXE are almost all truncated versions of the wav files that Red Wire sells.

I knew this might be the case, so I'm not that disappointed, but some people may think the claims on the Red Wire site apply to the AXE-FX when some of them do not. Just be aware.

I love my AXE, it was the best purchase I ever made, but last night after several hours of experience hosting the Red Wire CABINET IRs in both my DAW and the AXE it became CLEARLY evident the box doesn't do it all. So what? I can accept that. It's not perfect. Damn, but so close. SO CLOSE!

BTW, there are some good IRs in the bundle, although I'm not certain any will make my top 10. It will take days to try them all out.

Stephen Cole

Stephen,

You are welcome to your opinion and I have no issue with it.

I am not trying to be contrary, but I hear it very differently than you do. Mixing close mic'd IR's with the room IR's - in the Axe-FX at the 20ms limit - most definitely has a dramatic difference in tone, feel and response. I've experienced it myself; and know what I am hearing/feeling/sensing.

When you are talking about room ambient IR's in your DAW at full resolution, you are hearing REVERB. Not strictly the CAB. At 20ms you most definitely DO get the flavor of the CAB even from the room ambient mics.

You are free to disagree; and I am NOT looking for a debate. It's cool with me that we don't agree.

I just needed to post a response to your review.

All IMHO and YMMV (as it obviously does).
 
I appreciate that hearing "room signature" in a sound is colorful and appealing - I like reverb too.

But I don't want reverb as an inseperable part of cabinet IR's, mainly because I want the opportunity to hear the speaker / cab on it's own merits, unadulterated with room reflections. Any room that we play sound into has it's own characteristics, it's own reflections, decay, etc. And we have the option to add reverb in a very controllable way using the reverb block.

When you purchase a cab IR from Red Wires, they provide both WAV files including room characteristic, room mics only, and even Axe-FX files in it's native format. If an Axe-FX user chooses to mix provided room mic signals with the pure cab sound, you have the materials to do so, in abundance. Mike even provided a cool tool to play to your heart's content, if that's what turns your crank.

What more can you ask?
 
Re: Red Wirez "Tone Recipe Formula" Sharing Thread

Scott Peterson said:
sampleaccurate said:
There are a couple of things that users should be aware of concerning the Red Wire cab IRs.

I purchased the BigBox bundle and tried some of the Red Wire IRs last night, hosting them in my DAW and my AXE. Some of the IRs sounded great through the DAW, but on the AXE it was a different story. I quickly realized what I had speculated in a post written yesterday that the cabinet IRs might be longer than the 20ms allowed by the AXE.

If you think that everything beyond 20ms is irrelevant to reproducing the sound of a cab then I'd suggest you (or anyone else) do the same thing as I did last night. Host the Red Wirez IRs, especially with some ambient mics used, in your DAW, then host them in the AXE. Unfortunately the 20ms truncation in the AXE causes a significant loss of realism. I heard it for myself last night. Some of the IRs are over ten times as long as the ones the AXE can handle. At least one is over 200ms, and many more are well over 30ms.

The work around is to use a reverb module to create the early room reflections (unless of course you want a totally dry sound) using a small room type and adjusting to taste. I use a decay time of about .5 sec, but it's all a matter of taste.

The Red Wire website talks about how they use tuned rooms, and traps, and this and that, and ambient mics, and make it pretty clear that the room is part of the sound, or at least can be if you want it to. What they don't tell you is that you can't get anything more than the EQ curve with the AXE-FX versions. The ambient mics are completely useless. The files for the AXE are almost all truncated versions of the wav files that Red Wire sells.

I knew this might be the case, so I'm not that disappointed, but some people may think the claims on the Red Wire site apply to the AXE-FX when some of them do not. Just be aware.

I love my AXE, it was the best purchase I ever made, but last night after several hours of experience hosting the Red Wire CABINET IRs in both my DAW and the AXE it became CLEARLY evident the box doesn't do it all. So what? I can accept that. It's not perfect. Damn, but so close. SO CLOSE!

BTW, there are some good IRs in the bundle, although I'm not certain any will make my top 10. It will take days to try them all out.

Stephen Cole

Stephen,

You are welcome to your opinion and I have no issue with it.

I am not trying to be contrary, but I hear it very differently than you do. Mixing close mic'd IR's with the room IR's - in the Axe-FX at the 20ms limit - most definitely has a dramatic difference in tone, feel and response. I've experienced it myself; and know what I am hearing/feeling/sensing.

When you are talking about room ambient IR's in your DAW at full resolution, you are hearing REVERB. Not strictly the CAB. At 20ms you most definitely DO get the flavor of the CAB even from the room ambient mics.

You are free to disagree; and I am NOT looking for a debate. It's cool with me that we don't agree.

I just needed to post a response to your review.

All IMHO and YMMV (as it obviously does).

I'm not looking for a debate either (Jay wore me out in that department :D ). I just thought it worthy of mention considering the ambient miking techniques used by Red Wire.

It's not an opinion that the AXE truncates everything beyond 20ms. Even Red Wire has put a disclaimer on their website. It's not an opinion that this causes the AXE to respond very differently to SOME of the same IRs, particularly the ambient mics. It's not an opinion that the ambient mics are cut off at 20ms.

The ONLY real point is "don't expect to get out of the AXE the reverb you'll hear if you send a sample to RedWirez to process with one of their ambient mic IRs".

I also didn't mean to imply that anyone was intentionally trying to mislead anybody by not mentioning that some of the descriptions on the Red Wires site don't apply to the AXE, only to hosts that can handle IRs of 250ms or more.

I also don't doubt that you are hearing what you say you are, and I'm totally on board with the concept of mixing IRs. As I said, you convinced me to buy the BigBox bundle, and despite skepticism on the part of others I'm still confident I'll get some excellent results using this method.

Lastly, most of the IRs that Red Wire sells are only slightly longer than 20ms if that, and those all sound identical to my ears whether hosted by the AXE or my DAW. So there is no real difference for most of the IRs.

Thanks for letting me clear that up. Really cool thread BTW. I hope I can contribute some good cab mix formulas. I now have the goods to do so.

Stephen Cole
 
I have a precise way to insure that when I create a new IR by mixing multiple IRs by ear on a DAW, that the result I obtain sounds exactly the same on my AXE as it does on my workstation. It takes more time than using IRMixer, but it allows you to hear and adjust your tone in real-time. This isn't new but it addresses an issue that I have yet to see addressed concerning the length of the IRs. This post is a solution to what I perceive as a problem when using a DAW to mix your new cabinet tones from IRs you have purchased. The method also supports formula sharing of the Redwirez IRs using IRMixer.

I use Sonar 8 to process my sound through several IR convolution plugins simultaneously so that I can adjust their relative levels on the fly while playing. I set the input source on each IR plugin to the amp module output (with no cab) coming from the AXE. There is a separate track in Sonar for each IR used in the mix. Once I adjust the levels of the different IR cab sims using the track faders and everything is to my liking it's time to create the new IR.

There are two ways I do this. The easy way is to mix the IRs that I used at the same relative levels as their associated tracks. If the tracks were -5, -10, and -15 dB then I mix the IRs at -5, -10, and -15 dB and normalize the result.

Another method I use is one of the free (Voxengo) deconvolver programs that use a tone sweep to get the transfer function to create the new IR. I just drag a copy of the tone sweep audio clip to all of the active tracks and record the mix to a destination track. That's then exported as an audio file and processed through the Voxengo program to yield a brand new IR. The advantage to the second method is that you can use other non-time domain (under 20ms) effects like EQ to tweak your tone before generating the new IR. The disadvantage is that it's not possible to create a "formula" mix for IRMixer to share with others.

I'll be using the first approach and abandoning using any other effects so that I can share my results in the form of formulas that can be used with the redwirez IRMixer.

There are plenty of people who do it this way or a variation on this approach, but for AXE-FX owners, in order for this to work and have the results sound the same on the AXE as they do on a DAW, you will need to truncate any samples that exceed 20ms in length. If you don't truncate all of the IRs that you use to create your new IR prior to dialing in your tone on a DAW, the result will not sound the same on your AXE as it did on your computer workstation. It will probably sound very close in most cases unless the ambient mics are used, but it won't sound exactly the same if any of the IRs you used exceeded 20ms in length. Some will say I'm being picky here and that it's not necessary to do this. I disagree. I disagree because I can hear a difference, and with a little preparation up front I can ensure that my results are captured perfectly, not almost perfectly, or pretty close. I see no point in spending a lot of time (which I intend to) creating good cabinet simulations using my ears if what I create is altered in the process of transferring it to the AXE.

Here’s a program (free) and batch file I "wrote" for it (the batch file, not the program) you can use to truncate your IRs to 1024 points for use in your DAW so that when you create a new IR, it sounds the same when you import it into the AXE-FX as it did when you created it on your work station.

http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Download the program from the above link called SOX and unzip it.

Paste the following code into notepad and save it as truncate.txt. Rename the extension from txt to bat so it becomes truncate.bat



rem The converted files end up in a folder called `truncated'
cd %~dp0
mkdir truncated
FOR %%A IN (%*) DO sox %%A "truncated/%%~nxA" trim 0s 1024s
Pause



Put the truncate.bat file in the same directory as the sox.exe program.

Open a second instance of windows explorer and navigate to the folder where the files you wish to truncate are stored. Select the IR files you want to truncate, and drag them onto the filename truncate.bat (sounds strange but it works). You can drag and process about 10 files at a time. I did them in lots of 9 which are how most of the Redwirez samples are organized. It took me about an hour and a half to truncate about 500 IRs.

Dragging and dropping will process the files and put them in a directory called "truncated". The unprocessed source files will remain untouched.

It's a very cool little program with a lot of other powerful utilities. Have fun!

Stephen Cole
 
sampleaccurate said:
Here’s a program (free) and batch file I "wrote" for it (the batch file, not the program) you can use to truncate your IRs to 1024 points for use in your DAW so that when you create a new IR, it sounds the same when you import it into the AXE-FX as it did when you created it on your work station.

http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Download the program from the above link called SOX and unzip it.

Paste the following code into notepad and save it as truncate.txt. Rename the extension from txt to bat so it becomes truncate.bat



rem The converted files end up in a folder called `truncated'
cd %~dp0
mkdir truncated
FOR %%A IN (%*) DO sox %%A "truncated/%%~nxA" trim 0s 1024s
Pause



Put the truncate.bat file in the same directory as the sox.exe program.

Open a second instance of windows explorer and navigate to the folder where the files you wish to truncate are stored. Select the IR files you want to truncate, and drag them onto the filename truncate.bat (sounds strange but it works). You can drag and process about 10 files at a time. I did them in lots of 9 which are how most of the Redwirez samples are organized. It took me about an hour and a half to truncate about 500 IRs.

Dragging and dropping will process the files and put them in a directory called "truncated". The unprocessed source files will remain untouched.

It's a very cool little program with a lot of other powerful utilities. Have fun!

Stephen Cole

Thanks Stephen for that tip.
Didn't work for me because I had the sox directory on a different drive than C:
For all those who have the same problem, try this:

rem The converted files end up in a folder called `truncated'
SET _source=d:
%_source%
cd %~dp0
mkdir truncated
FOR %%A IN (%*) DO sox %%A "truncated\%%~nxA" trim 0s 1024s
Pause

on the second line you set the source drive (D: in my case)

Of course a much simpler way would be to copy the sox directory on the C-drive ;)
 
I've created a Perl script for the Mac users here. I'm not so familiar with Perl yet so I'm sure it can be made more efficient but it gets the job done :mrgreen:

Change some of the paths below and everything should work! It will truncate the wav files so you can use them in your DAW.


Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Basename;

my $opendir = "/Users/<UserName>/Documents/Red\ Wire\ Impulses/BIGBox/48\ KHz-24bit/";
opendir(my $dir, $opendir) || die "can't opendir $opendir: $!";
my @files = readdir($dir);

process_files($opendir);

# Accepts one argument: the full path to a directory.
# Returns: A list of files that reside in that path.
sub process_files {
    my $path = shift;

    opendir (DIR, $path)
        or die "Unable to open $path: $!";

    # We are just chaining the grep and map from
    # the previous example.
    # You'll see this often, so pay attention ;)
    # This is the same as:
    # LIST = map(EXP, grep(EXP, readdir()))
    my @files =
        # Third: Prepend the full path
        map { $path . '/' . $_ }
        # Second: take out '.' and '..'
        grep { !/^\.{1,2}$/ }
        # First: get all files
        readdir (DIR);

    closedir (DIR);

    for (@files) {
        if (-d $_) {
            # Add all of the new files from this directory
            # (and its subdirectories, and so on... if any)
            push @files, process_files ($_);

        } else {
        	($filename,$filepath,$filesuffix) = fileparse($_);
        	system ("~/Downloads/sox-14.3.0/sox \"$_\" \"/Users/<UserName>/Downloads/Truncated IRs/$filename\" trim 0s 1024s");
            print "converted $_\n";
        }
    }
    # NOTE: we're returning the list of files
    return @files;
}
 
Thanks for the work you guys are doing to make things easier for your fellow Axe-Fx users. Depending on which convolution plug-in you're using you may have to do one more step. When sox creates 48/24-bit wav files it uses a header that while technically correct is not understood by every convolution plugin. You may have to do something like this to convert it to PCM24 format:

sox input.wav -t wavpcm -s output.wav

Or, if y'all will check your update pages (or your original download pages) you will find an update that contains the 48KHz/24bit, 1024 sample truncated IRs that you've asked for. If you have any problems with the update let me know.

I will send an update email about it later this week for those of you who've lost your links. Please don't email me asking me to look up your link, it will be included in the update email :)

Muchas gracias.
 
Awesome Mike!!!

I can't download it yet though, an error occured while downloading. If someone can confirm this that would be great!

Code:
failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!
 
Back
Top Bottom