Tip for IR shooters

aziz

Power User
Overdrive your mic preamp! You're not supposed to do that, but hey, it works... Since the impulse technology does not capture the distortion, you'll get an intresting and unpredictable EQ change instead. The next time I'm shooting IRs, I'll do more of them, I did a few today as a "proof of concept", and I like the results. With my affordable neve clone preamp, the overdriven captures are very useful. For example, in this case it cuts the annoying high mid spike:

Normal first, overdriven 2nd:


Naturally, this means that now I'll have to go full gearslutz and buy an array of different mic preamps to test their overdrive characteristics...
 
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It's a cool trick to use as it flattens the IR. It's sort of like shooting an IR through a limiter/compressor. Sadly I've found that it doesn't capture "the sound of the mic pre" but instead saturates the test signal you're using so what you end up with is not a very realistic IR but getting something that's more flat is always good IMO. :) I for one use a pair of the most common pres (the ones that are around 2k€ in the used market) and to pass my own A/B tests I need to drive them as little as possible and after that I have another phase where I remove the tiniest color those pres have. :/ I know it sounds silly but I need my IR's to be intended for pro use where people can use their own pres. Nothing wrong with the clean transparent sound either. Quite the opposite I actually prefer it. :)
 
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