Speculum Speculorum
Power User
Folks of Fractal Audio Forum,
Obviously, there are a TON of professionally-made, high-quality impulse responses made with our needs in mind. But I recently got a Mesa 290 and a couple of Avatar 212 cabs and as always, my curiosity got the best of me. I REALLY liked the experience of playing in the room with a real cab, and so I put a mic on it. I had o fiddle for a few days to find what worked. Hell, it was the first time I ever actually mic'ed a cabinet. Since I've been recording I've been doing DI except for acoustic/vocals.
What I found is that I really liked the sound. I was able to mic the cab in the exact position that worked for my rig, rather than find an IR that got me in the closest ballpark and then tweak from there. The only problem was that it was loud, and since I value my hearing and general well-being, I started looking at shooting IRs.
Realizing that the power amp would VERY much color my IRs, I read up on the Mic + DI method and found a Whirlwind Director for $40 on reverb. Thus started the rabbit hole of the last couple of weeks.
I started shooting IRs totally experimentally, and what I found was they weren't translating very well on the Axe-fx II. Boomy, fizzy, and unbalanced. Some shots sounded good on their own but absolutely would NOT work in a mix. I tried several things for a few days of shooting (on axis, off axis, different speakers, etc), and was basically going to give up. Perhaps my room wasn't large or treated enough. This surprised me because the room itself is actually fairly good. Perhaps I just didn't actually like this cab as much as I thought I did and it was a honeymoon thing. Oh well. At least there were a ton of great 3rd party IRs out there.
That was, until I woke up this morning and had a thought. The Mic + DI method is meant to compensate for power amp coloring, so I was running my Mesa as I would when I was playing it live. The presence knobs were at about noon. It occurred to me upon waking, however, that perhaps the presence (which has effects on the whole frequency range, from what I can gather), was making it difficult for the Axe-fx II to get a compensation going on, and so with that in mind...
I went into my studio at 5 a.m. and had myself another go at it. I shot the first IR with an SM57 direct on the center cap (obviously going to be bright and brittle sounding), but I kept the presence at 0. Boom! Instant success! The IR immediately sounded like it should for the position. Considerably more balanced. Considerably better lows/highs/etc. With that in mind I shot 8 more positions around the dust cap of the speaker and was amazed at the results. I was getting the sound of my mic'ed cab at bedroom volumes! I also shot some with my Mojave MA201 (which before was fizzy beyond belief when I tried it) and once again, the results were excellent.
I'm not sure if this is the case with every other amp, but I can say that it TRULY made the difference in my case. I will now be able to start aiming in at the sweet spots of my speakers and get some absolutely killer sounds that will translate over across my live/recording rig, and I don't have to blow the walls off my house to do it. GREAT STUFF!
So, long story short, while there was a bit of a curve to figuring this out, shooting my own impulse responses has been one of the most gratifying processes I've gone through since owning this. I would highly recommend it to anybody who has the equipment, environment, and will to follow through with it.
Oh, and one other thing I learned during this experiment has to do with the cab-lab IR shooting process. It took me a few times to figure out what was going on here. I would shoot an IR, and if I didn't like the sound of it I would move the mic a little and shoot again... but there was no difference at all in the sound. That didn't make sense as when I figured out it wasn't changing I tried drastically different positions and they'd still sound the same.
It turns out you have to change off of scratchpad 1 on the axe-fx II side, and then go back to it, and it will only then load the freshly shot IR. It definitely tripped me out until I realized what was going on.
Obviously, there are a TON of professionally-made, high-quality impulse responses made with our needs in mind. But I recently got a Mesa 290 and a couple of Avatar 212 cabs and as always, my curiosity got the best of me. I REALLY liked the experience of playing in the room with a real cab, and so I put a mic on it. I had o fiddle for a few days to find what worked. Hell, it was the first time I ever actually mic'ed a cabinet. Since I've been recording I've been doing DI except for acoustic/vocals.
What I found is that I really liked the sound. I was able to mic the cab in the exact position that worked for my rig, rather than find an IR that got me in the closest ballpark and then tweak from there. The only problem was that it was loud, and since I value my hearing and general well-being, I started looking at shooting IRs.
Realizing that the power amp would VERY much color my IRs, I read up on the Mic + DI method and found a Whirlwind Director for $40 on reverb. Thus started the rabbit hole of the last couple of weeks.
I started shooting IRs totally experimentally, and what I found was they weren't translating very well on the Axe-fx II. Boomy, fizzy, and unbalanced. Some shots sounded good on their own but absolutely would NOT work in a mix. I tried several things for a few days of shooting (on axis, off axis, different speakers, etc), and was basically going to give up. Perhaps my room wasn't large or treated enough. This surprised me because the room itself is actually fairly good. Perhaps I just didn't actually like this cab as much as I thought I did and it was a honeymoon thing. Oh well. At least there were a ton of great 3rd party IRs out there.
That was, until I woke up this morning and had a thought. The Mic + DI method is meant to compensate for power amp coloring, so I was running my Mesa as I would when I was playing it live. The presence knobs were at about noon. It occurred to me upon waking, however, that perhaps the presence (which has effects on the whole frequency range, from what I can gather), was making it difficult for the Axe-fx II to get a compensation going on, and so with that in mind...
I went into my studio at 5 a.m. and had myself another go at it. I shot the first IR with an SM57 direct on the center cap (obviously going to be bright and brittle sounding), but I kept the presence at 0. Boom! Instant success! The IR immediately sounded like it should for the position. Considerably more balanced. Considerably better lows/highs/etc. With that in mind I shot 8 more positions around the dust cap of the speaker and was amazed at the results. I was getting the sound of my mic'ed cab at bedroom volumes! I also shot some with my Mojave MA201 (which before was fizzy beyond belief when I tried it) and once again, the results were excellent.
I'm not sure if this is the case with every other amp, but I can say that it TRULY made the difference in my case. I will now be able to start aiming in at the sweet spots of my speakers and get some absolutely killer sounds that will translate over across my live/recording rig, and I don't have to blow the walls off my house to do it. GREAT STUFF!
So, long story short, while there was a bit of a curve to figuring this out, shooting my own impulse responses has been one of the most gratifying processes I've gone through since owning this. I would highly recommend it to anybody who has the equipment, environment, and will to follow through with it.
Oh, and one other thing I learned during this experiment has to do with the cab-lab IR shooting process. It took me a few times to figure out what was going on here. I would shoot an IR, and if I didn't like the sound of it I would move the mic a little and shoot again... but there was no difference at all in the sound. That didn't make sense as when I figured out it wasn't changing I tried drastically different positions and they'd still sound the same.
It turns out you have to change off of scratchpad 1 on the axe-fx II side, and then go back to it, and it will only then load the freshly shot IR. It definitely tripped me out until I realized what was going on.
