the trick to make any IR sound great, and make great ones sound RIDICULOUS

Ooops I do see mic spacing in the small rm verb block also. But the levels are early and late.
Hey! major dummy ax8 user here.

can anyone explain how to use the verb block for this?
and secondly - IF i manage to understand the intricacy of this procedure:
seeing that the time setting can't go any lower than 0.10, what can i do to eliminate the very for tight rhythm presets?

thanks!
 
This "trick" (or early reflection reverb) is really a key to getting a realistic sound when using headphones. When you hear a guitar in a room, you're hearing directly from the speaker, but you also get a lot of reflections from the floor, room, ceiling, etc. That's what makes the sound "3D" to your ears - sound waves arriving at different times with different timbres. If you use headphones and only use a direct IR, you're missing out on all of the energy occurring in the room. The Room params in the cab block of the Axe-Fx II are a way to put those back in.

On the AX8 you can use a reverb and adjust the early reflection level to simulate the same thing. If you put down the headphones and listen to your speaker in a room, then you probably don't want those reflections (or nearly as much), as you're hearing the reflections naturally in your listening space. But dialing these in when using headphones is a critical step to making the sound come alive.
 
this doesnt quite do what op says it may make some reverb sound thats about it. not going to change the actual sound of the cab eq, which of course is the main sound. It is a nifty trick for adding some fullness etc. without reverb block. Yes I tried it. Im sure through headphones and recording it makes a bigger difference, but again wont 'change' an ir from sounding like crap to good.
 
so in the cab block there is a little built in room setting. i think i read somewhere it's just a little low-resource room emulation.

it has 3 controls:
1. level
2. size
3. mic spacing

Holy Shiznit, this is some seriously good knowledge you just dropped! I just tried this and was stunned how much more focused and "in my ears" my FRFR sounds. It's incredible when you actually learn what some of these knobs actually do and how to use them. For me, I ended up with 58% level, 1.67 size, and 25% mic spacing, and just wow.
 
We have NONE of those parameters in AX-8! A bit disappointed not being able to try it.
 
I agree - it fills things out - doesn't change the quality of an IR. A bad IR will just sound fuller. ;)

HAHA! psychoacoustic trickery! all it does it put some virtual space between you and the sound, and adds some level of stereo image to it. everything you hear is stereo, even mono sounds, because you've got two ears. you hear the sound from the source in both ears, and you hear the reflections from the walls back into both ears too.

i figured out though that one setting doesn't work for all IRs...if you change the IR i have to go back and 'refocus' the spacing and size until it tunes right. it's just like playing with the stereo separation sliders on the room mic in superior drummer, all they way out is super wide, in the middle is mono, and somewhere in between is where it comes into "focus" and makes it feel absolutely virtual-reality real.
 
I never experimented with any of the room settings before, but I have to say, there is a big difference here. I've been using 60% room level, 1.00 Room size, and 20% mic spacing, and I feel like I can walk into my guitar sound and walk around. Thanks for drawing my attention to this, Shatteredsquare. Awesome. :)

dude try walking size up from 1.00 to 1.50 slowly, and move it around in that range. better yet, put level at 100 so you can hear what it's doing, then walk size around between 1.00 and 5.00 till it feels perfect, then take level back down to 0.0, and then while you're playing walk level back up to where you feel it open up. 60 sounds great, but i found something weird it does right at 50%, it's hard to actually HEAR it do anything, but going from off and then right at 50%, it's gawdamn majical. it's just the slightest stereo image added with the little bit of ambient delay. it makes me start to laugh everytime i turn it back on.
 
this will totally wash out everything at a certain point, making the tone more "alive" but duller and less focused,
that's the main problem i have with IR's!

a mic recording will have both, an "alive 3D sound" and great clarity/focus and that's the BIG difference
between an IR and a mic'd cab.

the difference might not be noteworthy in regards of frequency response but there is a little bit more
about this than that...

i've stated this quite a few times but mostly got a bad response, which of course will not keep me away from saying this again and again.
funnily most negative response is in defense of the whole IR capturing thecnology, which honestly seems quite outdated.

btw i see exclusively this from the recording/mixing perspective!
IR's work very well, representing the tone of a mic'd guitar cabinet when noodling around, maybe
even for playing live, but when it comes to MIXING it's real pain in the but to make guitar tracks sit in the mix well. mic'd cab guitar tracks on the contrary mostly fit in the mix without any major adjustments, how come!? ;)

peace
 
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a mic recording will have both, an "alive 3D sound" and great clarity/focus and that's the BIG difference
between an IR and a mic'd cab.

the difference might not be noteworthy in regards of frequency response but there is a little bit more
about this than that...

i hear you dood, it's jacking up the phase big time in all seriousness. a cab on a mic picks up all those reflections when they come back at different times so it kind of makes a stereo image in mono, and the sound stays crisp you can hear everything because it's ALL IN PHASE, i have no idea wtf i am talking about but u know what i mean right. shure. you can tell what space the mic is in by how you hear the room respond and reverberate, even if super short, closet sized reverb.

doing this room sim thing is taking the IR print and adding reflections / diffusion to it at the end. IT'S A TRICK. softlight, audio diffusion. i'm just trying to doctor the most realest of real virtual rig tones i can using the available tools. give it a few years and there will be new IR technology that is basically advanced convolution that someone divided by the lowest common denominator and squeezed into code, accounting for the resonant frequency of an individual's sinus cavity.
 
yeah, i am also not a very technical person but i am very certain about what i can hear and feel.
"so it kind of makes a stereo image in mono" is actually a very good description, even if it does not make much sense
from a technical point of view.

i don't think we have to wait a few years, i am very positive that it's already possible to simulate a mic'd cab very accurately
with the technology we have available today. i am also pretty sure that cliff can do that, the problem is not with the technical possibilities.

i see this more from the offer/demand point of view. people seem pretty happy with IR's, so from a company stand point
it would not make big sense to invest time and money into something that most people do not care about and i can
understand this completely.

if more people would finally commit that IR's are yet not perfect i am sure that we would see something new and better very soon.

i might be that guy who is always trying to talk things down but hey, i actually love my axe fx, it's a great unit but it also does have
some weak points and pointing out these weak points can be a bit "dangerous" on this forum.

if i say anything negative about the axe fx it's not because i want to bash it but because i am trying to make it better,
but then again, who am i...
 
After comparing the two and playing with the Advanced parameters (Early Level, Diffusion, Mic Spacing, etc.) in the Reverb block quite a bit, to my ears the Cab block Room parameters have a greater stereo imaging quality that I simply couldn't replicate or tweak to sound superior using the former, but that's me.

I only now realize that the Room section of the Cab block is mono only if you select "Stereo UltraRes" or "Stereo" effect types. Mic Spacing does nothing when using a stereo cab. The Room delays are always mono. Using a mono cabinet type makes the Room section stereo when you increase the Mic Spacing parameter. In this instance, Room does indeed provide a nice tight stereo space to help alleviate the odd anechoic effect of IEMs. Looks like I'm using mono cabs from here on out.
 
I only now realize that the Room section of the Cab block is mono only if you select "Stereo UltraRes" or "Stereo" effect types. Mic Spacing does nothing when using a stereo cab. The Room delays are always mono. Using a mono cabinet type makes the Room section stereo when you increase the Mic Spacing parameter. In this instance, Room does indeed provide a nice tight stereo space to help alleviate the odd anechoic effect of IEMs. Looks like I'm using mono cabs from here on out.

YES!!! i tried mixing IR combinations with the stereo setting but it's hit or miss with the phasing. I couldn't really apply logic to mixing two mics like "oh i'll use this for the sharpness and this one for the warmth", 9 times out of 10 it's garbage, because you can't use your hands to deflect the mic in front of the cab 1/64" to change the pickup direction, you only get the impulse of wherever Mr. ML had the mic when he hit record. Sometimes two random garbage IRs come together to make a super rich full sound, just by happenstance one fills out the phase of another, but when there are 300 IRs to choose from, that makes for a lot of combinations to scroll through in search of the proverbial TONE NEEDLE. with a mono source, putting it in a space makes them all sound good by themselves. there needs to be a "random" function for mixing two IRs from two selected source locations, like the shuffle button in the Cubase mediabay.
 
make a video explaining and showing what you mean for all us rookies

all i have is an iPhone 5 and a Droid Turbo 2, and nothing to hold either of them with other than my hands, i'm going to get a digital camera soon so i can quit jacking around emailing myself pictures from one phone to another just to get them on the internet, i'll make a video showing how i went about putting a tone together. i take off one day a week and by the time that day rolls around it's sometimes hard to do anything.
 
this doesnt quite do what op says it may make some reverb sound thats about it. not going to change the actual sound of the cab eq, which of course is the main sound. It is a nifty trick for adding some fullness etc. without reverb block. Yes I tried it. Im sure through headphones and recording it makes a bigger difference, but again wont 'change' an ir from sounding like crap to good.

but it will change a crap IR to sound good! I was scrolling through presets in Superior Drummer 3 yesterday, and messing around with a Bob Rock preset that sounded crazy good. I was going through the sliders turning them off and on to see what they were doing, and i turned down the room mic and the whole mix went to sound like garbage. It sounded like out of phase kitchen pots played with spoons. Basically to say, if i had been trying to get a drum sound and had arrived at a mix like that, it would have gone in the trash. But if you turn the one room slider back up, the room mic filled in what seemed like missing phase from everything else, and the whole thing BLOOMED into what could only be a Bob Rock drum mix. it's TRICKS!
 
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